Group items tagged

the bell curve described the wealth and income distribution of American society

As the technology boom of the 1990s increased productivity, many assumed that the rising water level of the economy was raising all those middle class boats. But a different phenomenon has also occurred. The wealthy have gained substantially over the past two decades while the middle class has remained stagnant in real income, and the poor are simply poorer.

America is turning into a power-curve society: one where there are a relative few at the top and a gradually declining curve with a long tail of relatively poorer people.

For the first time since the end of World War II, the middle class is apparently doing worse, not better, than previous generations.

an alarming trend

What is the role of technology in these developments?

a sweeping look at the relationship between innovation and productivity

New Economy of Personal Information

Power-Curve Society

the future of jobs

the report covers the social, policy and leadership implications of the “Power-Curve Society,”

World Wide Web

as businesses struggle to come to terms with this revolution, a new set of structural innovations is washing over businesses, organizations and government, forcing near-constant adaptation and change. It is no exaggeration to say that the explosion of innovative technologies and their dense interconnections is inventing a new kind of economy.

the new technologies are clearly driving economic growth and higher productivity, the distribution of these benefits is skewed in worrisome ways.

the networked economy seems to be producing a “power-curve” distribution, sometimes known as a “winner-take-all” economy

Economic and social insecurity is widespread.

major component of this new economy, Big Data, and the coming personal data revolution fomenting beneath it that seeks to put individuals, and not companies or governments, at the forefront. Companies in the power-curve economy rely heavily on big databases of personal information to improve their marketing, product design, and corporate strategies. The unanswered question is whether the multiplying reservoirs of personal data will be used to benefit individuals as consumers and citizens, or whether large Internet companies will control and monetize Big Data for their private gain.

Why are winner-take-all dynamics so powerful?

appear to be eroding the economic security of the middle class

A special concern is whether information and communications technologies are actually eliminating more jobs than they are creating—and in what countries and occupations.

How is the power-curve economy opening up opportunities or shutting them down?

Is it polarizing income and wealth distributions? How is it changing the nature of work and traditional organizations and altering family and personal life?

many observers fear a wave of social and political disruption if a society’s basic commitments to fairness, individual opportunity and democratic values cannot be honored

what role government should play in balancing these sometimes-conflicting priorities. How might educational policies, research and development, and immigration policies need to be altered?

The Innovation Economy

Conventional economics says that progress comes from new infusions of capital, whether financial, physical or human. But those are not necessarily the things that drive innovation

What drives innovation are new tools and then the use of those new tools in new ways.”

at least 50 percent of the acceleration of productivity over these years has been due to ICT

economists have developed a number of proxy metrics for innovation, such as research and development expenditures.

Atkinson believes that economists both underestimate and overestimate the scale and scope of innovation.

Calculating the magnitude of innovation is also difficult because many innovations now require less capital than they did previously.

Others scholars

see innovation as going in cycles, not steady trajectories.

A conventional approach is to see innovation as a linear, exponential phenomenon

leads to gross errors

Atkinson

believes that technological innovation follows the path of an “S-curve,” with a gradual increase accelerating to a rapid, steep increase, before it levels out at a higher level. One implication of this pattern, he said, is that “you maximize the ability to improve technology as it becomes more diffused.” This helps explain why it can take several decades to unlock the full productive potential of an innovation.

innovation keeps getting harder. It was pretty easy to invent stuff in your garage back in 1895. But the technical and scientific challenges today are huge.”

costs of innovation have plummeted, making it far easier and cheaper for more people to launch their own startup businesses and pursue their unconventional ideas

innovation costs are plummeting

Atkinson conceded such cost-efficiencies, but wonders if “the real question is that problems are getting more complicated more quickly than the solutions that might enable them.

we may need to parse the different stages of innovation: “The cost of innovation generally hasn’t dropped,” he argued. “What has become less expensive is the replication and diffusion of innovation.”

what is meant by “innovation,”

“invention plus implementation.”

A lot of barriers to innovation can be found in the lack of financing, organizational support systems, regulation and public policies.

90 percent of innovation costs involve organizational capital,”

there is a serious mismatch between the pace of innovation unleashed by Moore’s Law and our institutional and social capacity to adapt.

This raises the question of whether old institutions can adapt—or whether innovation will therefore arise through other channels entirely. “Existing institutions are often run by followers of conventional wisdom,”

The best way to identify new sources of innovation, as Arizona State University President Michael Crow has advised, is to “go to the edge and ignore the center.”

Paradoxically, one of the most potent barriers to innovation is the accelerating pace of innovation itself.

Institutions and social practice cannot keep up with the constant waves of new technologies

“We are moving into an era of constant instability,”

“and the half-life of a skill today is about five years.”

Part of the problem, he continued, is that our economy is based on “push-based models” in which we try to build systems for scalable efficiencies, which in turn demands predictability.

The real challenge is how to achieve radical institutional innovations that prepare us to live in periods of constant two- or three-year cycles of change. We have to be able to pick up new ideas all the time.”

pace of innovation is a major story in our economy today.

The App Economy consists of a core company that creates and maintains a platform (such as Blackberry, Facebook or the iPhone), which in turn spawns an ecosystem of big and small companies that produce apps and/or mobile devices for that platform

tied this success back to the open, innovative infrastructure and competition in the U.S. for mobile devices

standard

The App Economy illustrates the rapid, fluid speed of innovation in a networked environment

crowdsourcing model

winning submissions are

globally distributed in an absolute sense

problem-solving is a global, Long Tail phenomenon

As a technical matter, then, many of the legacy barriers to innovation are falling.

small businesses are becoming more comfortable using such systems to improve their marketing and lower their costs; and, vast new pools of personal data are becoming extremely useful in sharpening business strategies and marketing.

Another great boost to innovation in some business sectors is the ability to forge ahead without advance permission or regulation,

“In bio-fabs, for example, it’s not the cost of innovation that is high, it’s the cost of regulation,”

This notion of “permissionless innovation” is crucial,

“In Europe and China, the law holds that unless something is explicitly permitted, it is prohibited. But in the U.S., where common law rather than Continental law prevails, it’s the opposite

“We find that people will copy your design no matter what you do,” she says. “You might as well just play the game and go ahead and innovate. It’s fun, it keeps us on our toes.”

“The open source model just forces us to innovate,” says Boudreaux.

the open hardware model means that SparkFun’s existence depends not on any particular product, but on an ongoing relationship with customers that’s not too dissimilar to the loyalty commanded by a fashion house.

wolf of obsolescence is always at electronics’ door

don’t spend much time worrying about the copyists, they just keep releasing new looks

it’s about staying relevant and filling the needs of the community

SparkFun’s rapid turnover model is one that echoes the fashion industry.

keep their service exemplary

listening to their customers

developed a community of loyal users and fans

weekly new product posts

You can learn a lot about what a company cares about by looking at what they give away and what they protect.

SparkFun’s actual value is in the community of fans and loyal customers that keep coming back, and the expertise under its roof in servicing their needs.

Their catalog has about 2,500 items at any given time

SparkFun orders parts from 500 suppliers

Of the 2,500 items, about 400 are things designed internally.

hey retire products at a similar rate, due to either low sales, or obsolescence

15 new products every week

“We have to be willing to kill ideas that don’t work, take a lot of tough criticism, and move fast. If we stay agile, we stay relevant.”

“We try to do small runs and order in small quantities. Especially something that’s going to be obsolete quickly.”

To help manage the demand, they use an in-house software system

along with inventory and CMS management, tries to predict demand for different components and ensure they get ordered with sufficient lead time to account for how long it takes to get there.

the innovation (revisions and new releases) here at SparkFun is organic and not planned,” says Boudreaux, “But we do a few things to make sure we are keeping up.”

monitors all costumer feedback from emails to the comment section that is present on every page of the company’s site. They also ensure that team members have time to tinker in the office, write tutorials, and visit hackerspaces and maker events. “For us, designing (and revising) widgets is the job.”

anyone in the company can suggest ideas and contribute designs.

ideas run through an internal process of design, review, prototyping, testing and release.

“They eat these products up, even if the products are not ready for the mainstream & educator community due to minimal documentation or stability.”

symbiotic relationship with these early adopters, where feedback helps SparkFun revised and improve products for use by the rest of the community

I don’t think they help much

The risk of this rate of change is that SparkFun can end up outpacing some of their customers.

“There’s balance in everything,” says Boudreaux, “Innovation does not necessarily need speed in order to create valuable change. Sometimes innovation works at a slower pace, but that does not mean it is any less valuable to those that benefit from it, and we are constantly balancing the needs of two very different customers.”

unprotected and unencumbered by patents

racing to get the latest, coolest things in the hands of its customers.

patents

To handle the pace of change, SparkFun needs to keep its inventory lean.

cost $30,000 to $50,000

USPTO is so backed up you’ll have to wait three to five years to even hear back on their decision.

how much does technology change in five years?

company’s blog where they’ve been documenting production and business practices for years.

they even want to open source Sparkle. “It’s a wild ride,” she says, “but a fun one for sure.”

A broad statement of the key idea of smart contracts, then, is to say that contracts should be embedded in the world.

And where the vending machine, like electronic mail, implements an asynchronous protocol between the vending company and the customer, some smart contracts entail multiple synchronous steps between two or more parties

POS (Point of Sale)

EDI (Electronic Data Interchange

SWIFT

allocation of public network bandwidth via automated auctions

Smart contracts reference that property in a dynamic, proactively enforced form, and provide much better observation and verification where proactive measures must fall short.

The mechanisms of the world should be structured in such a way as to make the contracts (a) robust against naive vandalism, and (b) robust against sophisticated, incentive compatible (rational) breach.

A third category, (c) sophisticated vandalism (where the vandals can and are willing to sacrifice substantial resources), for example a military attack by third parties, is of a special and difficult kind that doesn't often arise in typical contracting, so that we can place it in a separate category and ignore it here.

The threat of physical force is an obvious way to embed a contract in the world -- have a judicial system decide what physical steps are to be taken out by an enforcement agency (including arrest, confiscation of property, etc.) in response to a breach of contract

It is what I call a reactive form of security.

The need to invoke reactive security can be minimized, but not eliminated, by making contractual arrangements verifiable

Observation of a contract in progress, in order to detect the first sign of breach and minimize losses, also is a reactive form of security

A proactive form of security is a physical mechanism that makes breach expensive

From common law, economic theory, and contractual conditions often found in practice, we can distill four basic objectives of contract design

observability

The disciplines of auditing and investigation roughly correspond with verification of contract performance

verifiability

The field of accounting is, roughly speaking, primarily concerned with making contracts an organization is involved in more observable

privity

This is a generalization of the common law principle of contract privity, which states that third parties, other than the designated arbitrators and intermediaries, should have no say in the enforcement of a contract

The field of security (especially, for smart contracts, computer and network security), roughly corresponds to the goal of privity.

enforceability

Reputation, built-in incentives, "self-enforcing" protocols, and verifiability can all play a strong part in meeting the fourth objective

Smart contracts often involve trusted third parties, exemplified by an intermediary, who is involved in the performance, and an arbitrator, who is invoked to resolve disputes arising out of performance (or lack thereof)

In smart contract design we want to get the most out of intermediaries and arbitrators, while minimizing exposure to them

Legal barriers are the most severe cost of doing business across many jurisdictions. Smart contracts can cut through this Gordian knot of jurisdictions

Where smart contracts can increase privity, they can decrease vulnerability to capricious jurisdictions

Secret sharing

The field of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), in which elements of traditional business transactions (invoices, receipts, etc.) are exchanged electronically, sometimes including encryption and digital signature capabilities, can be viewed as a primitive forerunner to smart contracts

One important task of smart contracts, that has been largely overlooked by traditional EDI, is critical to "the meeting of the minds" that is at the heart of a contract: communicating the semantics of the protocols to the parties involved

There is ample opportunity in smart contracts for "smart fine print": actions taken by the software hidden from a party to the transaction.

Thus, via hidden action of the software, the customer is giving away information they might consider valuable or confidential, but the contract has been drafted, and transaction has been designed, in such a way as to hide those important parts of that transaction from the customer.

To properly communicate transaction semantics, we need good visual metaphors for the elements of the contract. These would hide the details of the protocol without surrendering control over the knowledge and execution of contract terms

Protocols based on mathematics, called cryptographic protocols, tre the basic building blocks that implement the improved tradeoffs between observability, verifiability, privity, and enforceability in smart contracts

secret key cryptography,

Public key cryptography

digital signatures

blind signature

Where smart contracts can increase observability or verifiability, they can decrease dependence on these obscure local legal codes and enforcement traditions

zero-knowledge interactive proof

digital mix

Keys are not necessarily tied to identities, and the task of doing such binding turns out to be more difficult than at first glance.

All public key operation are are done inside an unreadable hardware board on a machine with a very narrow serial-line connection (ie, it carries only a simple single-use protocol with well-verified security) to a dedicated firewall. Such a board is available, for example, from Kryptor, and I believe Viacrypt may also have a PGP-compatable board. This is economical for central sites, but may be less practical for normal users. Besides better security, it has the added advantage that hardware speeds up the public key computations.

If Mallet's capability is to physically sieze the machine, a weaker form of key protection will suffice. The trick is to hold the keys in volatile memory.

The data is still vulnerable to a "rubber hose attack" where the owner is coerced into revealing the hidden keys. Protection against rubber hose attacks might require some form of Shamir secret sharing which splits the keys between diverse phgsical sites.

How does Alice know she has Bob's key? Who, indeed, can be the parties to a smart contract? Can they be defined just by their keys? Do we need biometrics (such as autographs, typed-in passwords, retina scans, etc.)?

The public key cryptography software package "Pretty Good Privacy" (PGP) uses a model called "the web of trust". Alice chooses introducers whom she trusts to properly identify the map between other people and their public keys. PGP takes it from there, automatically validating any other keys that have been signed by Alice's designated introducers.

1) Does the key actually belong to whom it appears to belong? In other words, has it been certified with a trusted signature?

2) Does it belong to an introducers, someone you can trust to certify other keys?

3) Does the key belong to someone you can trust to introduce other introducers? PGP confuses this with criterion (2). It is not clear that any single person has enough judgement to properly undertake task (3), nor has a reasonable institution been proposed that will do so. This is one of the unsolved problems in smart contracts.

PGP also can be given trust ratings and programmed to compute a weighted score of validity-- for example, two marginally trusted signatures might be considered as credible as one fully trusted signature

Notaries Public Two different acts are often called "notarization". The first is simply where one swears to the truth of some affidavit before a notary or some other officer entitled to take oaths. This does not require the notary to know who the affiant is. The second act is when someone "acknowledges" before a notary that he has executed a document as ``his own act and deed.'' This second act requires the notary to know the person making the acknowledgment.

"Identity" is hardly the only thing we might want map to a key. After all, physical keys we use for our house, car, etc. are not necessarily tied to our identity -- we can loan them to trusted friends and relatives, make copies of them, etc. Indeed, in cyberspace we might create "virtual personae" to reflect such multi-person relationships, or in contrast to reflect different parts of our personality that we do not want others to link. Here is a possible classification scheme for virtual personae, pedagogically presented:

A nym is an identifier that links only a small amount of related information about a person, usually that information deemed by the nym holder to be relevant to a particular organization or community

A nym may gain reputation within its community.

With Chaumian credentials, a nym can take advantage of the positive credentials of the holder's other nyms, as provably linked by the is-a-person credential

A true name is an identifier that links many different kinds of information about an person, such as a full birth name or social security number

As in magick, knowing a true name can confer tremendous power to one's enemies

A persona is any perstient pattern of behavior, along with consistently grouped information such as key(s), name(s), network address(es), writing style, and services provided

A reputable name is a nym or true name that has a good reputation, usually because it carries many positive credentials, has a good credit rating, or is otherwise highly regarded

Reputable names can be difficult to transfer between parties, because reputation assumes persistence of behavior, but such transfer can sometimes occur (for example, the sale of brand names between companies).

Blind signatures can be used to construct digital bearer instruments, objects identified by a unique key, and issued, cleared, and redeemed by a clearing agent.

The clearing agent prevents multiple clearing of particular objects, but can be prevented from linking particular objects one or both of the clearing nyms who transferred that object

These instruments come in an "online" variety, cleared during every transfer, and thus both verifiable and observable, and an "offline" variety, which can be transfered without being cleared, but is only verifiable when finally cleared, by revealing any the clearing nym of any intermediate holder who transfered the object multiple times (a breach of contract).

To implement a full transaction of payment for services, we need more than just the digital cash protocol; we need a protocol that guarantees that service will be rendered if payment is made, and vice versa

A credential is a claim made by one party about another. A positive credential is one the second party would prefer to reveal, such as a degree from a prestigious school, while that party would prefer not to reveal a negative credential such as a bad credit rating.

A Chaumian credential is a cryptographic protocol for proving one possesses claims made about onself by other nyms, without revealing linkages between those nyms. It's based around the is-a-person credential the true name credential, used to prove the linkage of otherwise unlinkable nyms, and to prevent the transfer of nyms between parties.

Another form of credential is bearer credential, a digital bearer instrument where the object is a credential. Here the second party in the claim refers to any bearer -- the claim is tied only to the reputable name of issuing organization, not to the nym or true name of the party holding the credential.

Smart Property We can extend the concept of smart contracts to property. Smart property might be created by embedding smart contracts in physical objects. These embedded protocols would automatically give control of the keys for operating the property to the party who rightfully owns that property, based on the terms of the contract. For example, a car might be rendered inoperable unless the proper challenge-response protocol is completed with its rightful owner, preventing theft. If a loan was taken out to buy that car, and the owner failed to make payments, the smart contract could automatically invoke a lien, which returns control of the car keys to the bank. This "smart lien" might be much cheaper and more effective than a repo man. Also needed is a protocol to provably remove the lien when the loan has been paid off, as well as hardship and operational exceptions. For example, it would be rude to revoke operation of the car while it's doing 75 down the freeway.

Smart property is software or physical devices with the desired characteristics of ownership embedded into them; for example devices that can be rendered of far less value to parties who lack possesion of a key, as demonstrated via a zero knowledge interactive proof

One method of implementing smart property is thru operation necessary data (OND): data necessary to the operation of smart property.

A smart lien is the sharing of a smart property between parties, usually two parties called the owner and the lienholder.

Many parties, especially new entrants, may lack this reputation capital, and will thus need to be able to share their property with the bank via secure liens

What about extending the concept of contract to cover agreement to a prearranged set of tort laws? These tort laws would be defined by contracts between private arbitration and enforcement agencies, while customers would have a choice of jurisdictions in this system of free-market "governments".

If these privately practiced law organizations (PPLs for short) bear ultimate responsibility for the criminal activities of their customers, or need to insure lack of defection or future payments on the part of customers, they may in turn ask for liens against their customers, either in with contractual terms allowing arrest of customers under certain conditions

Other important areas of liability include consumer liability and property damage (including pollution). There need to mechanisms so that, for example, pollution damage to others' persons or property can be assessed, and liens should exist so that the polluter can be properly charged and the victims paid. Where pollution is quantifiable, as with SO2 emissions, markets can be set up to trade emission rights. The PPLs would have liens in place to monitor their customer's emissions and assess fees where emission rights have been exceeded.

find new ways of efficiency

arbitration between efficiency and care

a global thinking of the problem

Fighting the attention and desire resource shortage: stoping to use advertisement?

The question is rather here to think the moderation of the psychopower

empower transindividuation, i.e. to make sure that an economic activity creates more possibilities of individuation than it tend to destroy by attempting to capture attention and canalize motivation in a funnel. Empower transindividuation would imply to empowering actors of their own lifestyle, winning back the savoir-vivre prescribing production

Should marketing stop using psychopower?

marketing ethics guidelines

transactions are more likely to be morally defensible if both parties enter it freely and fully informed

the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace

putting freedom as a criteria of morality

the industrial use of pycho- and neuropower tend to fall under the category of barriers to freedom

neurotechniques – to capture the attention

psychotechniques – to attempt to create motivation

Most people think commercials are a small price to pay for these benefits

advertising

denying the schemes of addiction and the fact that we are becoming through the objects of attentions

right to avoid attention capture by advertising

progress made in cognitive sciences proving that

reward system being abnormally stimulated

Advertisements exploit

vulnerability and reinforce their overconsumption behaviors

“if food advertising on TV were banned, significant reductions in the prevalence of childhood obesity are possible.” (Veerman et al. 2009)

What is at stake falls to be much more complex than the sole Freedom of Speech invoked for the advertiser

liberty of non-reception

would mean to guaranty every citizen the right to choose where and when he wants to access the advertising information

Change in the industrial and commercial paradigm

Economy of contribution and peer production

An economy of contribution means that users of a service are contributing to the production of these services.

example

is open-source software that are contributively build by potentially hundreds of developers organized in communities

minimize the gap between the producer and consumer

blur the frontier between professionals and amateurs

The Copernican revolution of the Vendor Relationship Management paradigm

change in the commercial paradigm, described as an Intention Economy i.e. the opposite of the Attention Economy

consumers are charged to express and discuss their intention

with businesses rather than the usual paradigm in which businesses where fighting for a piece of canalized motivation

Implementing such a system would nevertheless imply that marketing departments dispose of a system in which they could value their supplies and where they could be easily found by customers. Doc Searls promotes his answer to this issue: the Vendor Relationship Management system.

the belief that free customers are more valuable than captive ones — to themselves, to vendors, and to the larger economy.

To be free

1. Customers must enter relationships with vendors as independent actors.

2. Customers must be the points of integration for their own data.

3. Customers must have control of data they generate and gather. This means they must be able to share data selectively and voluntarily.

4. Customers must be able to assert their own terms of engagement.

5. Customers must be free to express their demands and intentions outside of any one company’s control.

This is a profoundly game-changing approach

big data that is the rush for consumers’ information potentially leading to the same dead-end of attention destruction and affective saturation than the former offline paradigm

VRM system working as a marketplace

the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace

less imperfect and less biased information in a cultural context overvaluing transparency, and a bigger atomicity due to the hereafter introduced trend for re-localized peer production.

3.2.2.3 VRM and externalization of the socialization process

Promoting the end of advertisement

means to find a new way to make the information circulate, what was the primary goal of advertisement

Until there is no alternative to massive advertisement campaign for the information circulation, it is indeed hard to ask entrepreneurs and managers to get rid of those successors of propaganda: such a transition process necessarily imply adaptation costs from the producer and the consumer side, and possible competitive disadvantage against competitors still maximizing profit through advertisement means

But the internet transformation of the general organology offers new way to think information circuits and potentially constitute an opportunity to externalize the socialization process of products that is to empower citizen-consumers organized in communities

Empowering groups of citizen doesn’t annihilate the risks of mis-use or counterproductive interest-taker behaviors but a well-designed system of trust between peers could minimize this risk by creating a dependency to what social capital other peers give you, as it is happening in the sharing economy: the credibility of a contributive peer would be guaranteed through what the P2P Foundation calls Feedback systems and peer-police

a strong structuration of products characteristics, allowing customers to personalize their choices according to their desire and constraints: such a “VRM+” system

Marketing would then be the art of being as high as possible in this ranking, as it is happening in SEO for search engines, but in this context of criteria explosion, marketing would then be the disciple of listening to customers’ wishes and aspiration needing an attention, in order to kick in the production or to adapt the following series.

3.2.2.4 Toward a possible equi-power

Such a system would tremendously re-configure the balance of power and tend toward a form of equi-power i.e. a social organization in which abuses of a “big” would be the potential object of a ranking sanction by the peers

self-regulative function

a form of economic Darwinism would let to conscious organization the right to curve their path toward a durable configuration in accordance with the social ecosystem.

the idea of equi-power is a form of homogenization of the social matter, in which the distortions in the balance of power would be compensated by the gathering of small forces sharing a common interest

Such a sanction systems, if successfully implemented, would make value-destructing businesses progressively decline and hopefully bankrupt,

long-term valuable strategic choice

long term satisfyingly high ranking

It would be utopic to think that the “being cool” marketing

would disappear, but marketers would have to make those two objectives compose together.

This social capital contagion is nevertheless a tool that would need to be controlled in its form of violence by extensive testings and iterations with forms of protections for the smallest peers, that is to say to keep this form of social violence to institutionalized, classic forms of businesses, clearly beyond the line of what should be acceptable in the global village.

the goal is here to create an artificial form of majority that is a self-censuring responsible behavior of corporations

we cannot actually see this in the figures for economic growth.

a problem of measurement. Of the way in which GDP itself is a useful but not complete measure.

certain uses of the internet actually reduce GDP: even while making us as individuals richer.

we’re measuring economic growth wrong.

We have managed to build an economy where trying something new has become increasingly difficult.

A class can have subclasses that represent concepts that are more specific than the superclass.

Here we discuss general issues to consider and offer one possible process for developing an ontology. We describe an iterative approach to ontology development: we start with a rough first pass at the ontology. We then revise and refine the evolving ontology and fill in the details. Along the way, we discuss the modeling decisions that a designer needs to make, as well as the pros, cons, and implications of different solutions.

In practical terms, developing an ontology includes: �         defining classes in the ontology, �         arranging the classes in a taxonomic (subclass–superclass) hierarchy, �         defining slots and describing allowed values for these slots, �         filling in the values for slots for instances.

We can then create a knowledge base by defining individual instances of these classes filling in specific slot value information and additional slot restrictions.

Slots describe properties of classes and instances:

some fundamental rules in ontology design

There is no one correct way to model a domain— there are always viable alternatives. The best solution almost always depends on the application that you have in mind and the extensions that you anticipate. 2)      Ontology development is necessarily an iterative process. 3)      Concepts in the ontology should be close to objects (physical or logical) and relationships in your domain of interest. These are most likely to be nouns (objects) or verbs (relationships) in sentences that describe your domain.

how detailed or general the ontology is going to be

what we are going to use the ontology for

concepts in the ontology must reflect this reality

We suggest starting the development of an ontology by defining its domain and scope. That is, answer several basic questions: �         What is the domain that the ontology will cover? �         For what  we are going to use the ontology? �         For what types of questions the information in the ontology should provide answers? �         Who will use and maintain the ontology?

plan to use

domain

If the people who will maintain the ontology describe the domain in a language that is different from the language of the ontology users, we may need to provide the mapping between the languages.

One of the ways to determine the scope of the ontology is to sketch a list of questions that a knowledge base based on the ontology should be able to answer, competency questions

These competency questions are just a sketch and do not need to be exhaustive.

Many animals use visual observations to decide whether to work with others.

humans are more cooperative when they sense they're being watched.

The feeling of being watched enhances cooperation, and so does the ability to watch others. To try to know what others are doing is a fundamental part of being human

Shame serves as a warning to adhere to group standards or be prepared for peer punishment. Many individualistic societies, however, have migrated away from peer punishment toward a third-party penal system

Shame has become less relevant in societies where taking the law into one's own hands is viewed as a breach of civility.

Many problems, like most concerning the environment, are group problems. Perhaps to solve these problems we need a group emotion. Maybe we need shame.

Guilt prevails in many social dilemmas

It is perhaps unsurprising that a set of tools has emerged to assuage this guilt

Guilt abounds in many situations where conservation is an issue.

The problem is that environmental guilt, though it may well lead to conspicuous ecoproducts, does not seem to elicit conspicuous results.

The positive effect of idealistic consumers does exist, but it is masked by the rising demand and numbers of other consumers.

Guilt is a valuable emotion, but it is felt by individuals and therefore motivates only individuals. Another drawback is that guilt is triggered by an existing value within an individual. If the value does not exist, there is no guilt and hence no action

Getting rid of shaming seems like a pretty good thing, especially in regulating individual behavior that does no harm to others. In eschewing public shaming, society has begun to rely more heavily on individual feelings of guilt to enhance cooperation.

five thousand years ago, there arose another tool: writing

Judges in various states issue shaming punishments,