Adaptive Webs for Heterarchies with Diverse Communities of Users 1
Luis Mateus Rocha · 2001
We discuss the concept of Heterarchy, understood in the social sciences as a model of complex, adaptive human organizations capable of evolving in rapidly changing environments. We observe that heterarchies tend to lead to control hierarchies, because as complex adaptive systems that make use of tags, emergent levels of behavior and control are expected to occur. Given that tags play a fundamental role in heterarchies, we propose that they can make good use of adaptive webs as a communication fabric to manage and co-evolve the knowledge traded with their communities of members and users. A recommendation system named TalkMine is then presented to advance adaptive web technology for heterarchies. TalkMine leads different information resources to learn new and adapt existing keywords to the categories recognized by its communities of users. It uses distributed artificial intelligence algorithms and is currently being implemented for the research library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory