Armillaria
URL = http://wiki.aardrock.com/Armillaria
Description
"Armillaria
Armillaria is the code name for a software project that aims to grow a fully distributed social reputation system.
Armillaria is a scale-free unifying construct of a directed, weighted, contextual semantic network that connects humans, their mental models, and their artifacts to enable swarms to reach collective decisions and solutions, based on ever evolving mutual social reputation.
Armillaria is not unlike the blend of Google's page ranking, eBay's marketplace , Orkut's social network, and the tagging power of Flickr, del.icio.us, and Technocrati.
You are kindly invited to develop a working prototype of Armillaria in the form of an extensible and well-documented library of Java packages that are, in turn, used to implement a small elegant and vibrant, yet to be specified, "serious game" that behaves like a self-organizing and self-healing ecosystem.
How do you balance individual equality and the collective good? How do you reach collective decisions in a fair, distrubuted, and bottom-up way? How do you aggregate individual preferences into collective mental maps? How do you multiply the power of top-down designed common vocabularies with the power of bottom-up "folksonomy"? How do you make sure that the system evolves over time and continually adapts to the current situation? So called stigmergency (on July 1st, 2006, Google only listed 23 results for the term "stigmergence", 37 results on October 2nd, 2006, 202 results on August 21, 2007).
Trust is key here. And trust relations are more accurate if they are domain specific. You can trust Mary's knowledge in the domain of diabetes, but don't ask her anything on cars. Trust is a measure of similarity of thought between two individuals within a particular domain. Weighted votes in a web of trust form a holographic model of the whole population.
Armillaria is a stigmergent system that determines the entities and relations in a particular semantic network data structure instantiation. Contained within any instantiation is a set of humans, their domains, their problems, and their solutions. Armillaria helps establish and evolve trust relationships between its members by providing the framework for aggregating perspectives. The Armillaria framework supports the full range of dictators and despots and fully social network based representative democracies." (http://wiki.aardrock.com/Armillaria)