siddharth wrote:
you're right about the language issue - even a basic word in the
complexity debate- eg. 'modeling'- is interpreted/understood slightly
differently in architecture..its easier when they mean things totally
different, like your example- its really tricky when they mean things
almost the same, yet not - these micro-shifts in meaning make things,
well, complex-er!
thanks!
For what it is worth, I've been working with Dr. Deana Pennington of UNM
on this very topic... a joint UNM/Santa Fe Complex proposal to the NSF
was just declined, but had it been funded, we would have been extending
work done on a related NSF grant just ending this month on the topic of
"the Science of Collaboration". Central to this work is the notion
that each discipline (and subdiscipline and individual) has a distinct
but complementary set of concept and terms that they use to understand
and share their work. One of the tools to be developed is a
collaborative tool for eliciting and resolving the terms and concepts
across cross-disciplinary teams and projects.
We are still seeking funding and opportunities to continue this work and
it is an obvious project to carry forth at the Santa Fe Complex (in
collaboration with UNM, etc.) if possible.
We (Santa Fe Complex) just hosted a workshop for this team on Agent
Based and Cellular Automata Modeling. It did not address the problem
of language directly but indirectly did by providing a variety of
practitioners with a common working vocabulary (to whit, NetLogo) for
expressing and exploring simulations. Of course, within the context
of this course, we immediately encountered terminology conflicts (when
is a "patch" a "cell"? etc.)
Seconding the spirit of Nick's point, it is this very ambiguity that
provides the expressiveness and the leverage. If you constrained
everyone to a controlled vocabulary, you would have nothing more useful
than an efficient bureaucracy within a fascist government. Things
would generally be unambiguous, but rarely useful!
- Steve
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