The Internet has become a major vehicle for people to engage virtual cooperative interaction in which loosely associated individuals interact through a complex social network to mutual benefits. It has given new prominence to human discourse as a continuing source of knowledge. With the growth of usage of listservers and the World Wide Web, it is important to model and support the processes by which knowledge is acquired and disseminated through the Internet (i.e., the net). The emerging cyberorganism consisted of distributed intelligent agents, that is the Internet community at large, provides a `cybernetic living expert system' with a scope and scale well beyond that yet conceivable with computer-based systems alone. This dissertation develops a living systems conceptual framework for modeling socio-technical processes on the net; describes various forms of support mechanisms on the net and categorizes them in terms of the model; applies the conceptual model to generate techniques ...

Knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing subject (Ernst von Glasersfeld 1995: 18) Paper type: Conceptual perspective. Background(s): Physics, biology, epistemology Perspectives: Theory of autopoietic systems, Popperian evolutionary epistemology and the biology of cognition. Context: This paper is a contribution to developing the theories of hierarchically complex living systems and the natures of knowledge in such systems. Problem: Dissonance between the literatures of knowledge management and organization theory and my observations of the living organization led to consideration of foundation questions: What does it mean to be alive? What is knowledge? How are life and knowledge related? Method: The approach is synthetic and multidisciplinary. The concept of autopoiesis (as defined by Maturana) as a definition for life, and knowledge as a product of autopoiesis are developed from first principles regarding the behavior of dynamical systems in time. Results: Autopoiesis and the construction of knowledge are inseparable aspects of physical phenomena scalable to many levels of organization (e.g., cells, multicellular organisms, organizations, social systems, etc.). The result unifies theories of epistemology, physical dynamics, life, biological evolution, knowledge and social systems. Implications: Results highlight the importance to understand autopoiesis as first defined by Maturana and Varela – as a complex physical phenomenon persisting over time. Autopoietic “self-observation ” is not paradoxical. As dynamic physical processes, any internal/external activities relating to “observations ” are displaced in time. The worlds living systems act on are not those observed. “Circularly closed ” systems are actually open spirals along the axis of time.

Hierarchical feature representation through multi-scale segmentation offers new possibilities in mapping complex systems. We lay out that the recognition of natural features is more difficult than the recognition of anthropogenic features such as houses or roads. For the latter group spectral and spatial characteristics can be anticipated and rules can be defined. Consequently, the automated extraction of roads or the 3D extraction of buildings is very advanced. In contrast, the automatic extraction of natural features like habitats is still far from being operational. We discuss reasons for that and highlight an object-based image segmentation methodology which incorporates spectral, spatial, topological and hierarchical characteristics of the objects within a semantic network. 1.

The Internet has become a major resource for virtual organizations, and it has given new prominence to human discourse as a continuing source of knowledge. With the growth of usage of list servers and the World Wide Web, it is important to model and support the processes by which knowledge is acquired and disseminated through the net. The global virtual organizations of distributed intelligent agents, that is the Internet community at large, provides a `cybernetic living expert system' with a scope and scale well beyond that yet conceivable with computer-based systems alone. In developing new support tools is one asks "what is the starting point for the person seeking information, the existing information that is the basis for their search." A support tool is then one that takes that existing information and uses it to present further information that is likely to be relevant. Such information may include relevant concepts, text, existing documents, people, sites, list servers, news gr...

INTRODUCTION The ubiquity of hierarchical order is obvious, and the obvious is hard to explain, but a number of workers [1] have suggested the possibility of constructing a theory (or cluster of theories), rooted in such disciplines as thermodynamics, information theory, topology, and logic, which might reveal the underlying unity of a wide variety of branching and multi-level systems. It is the purpose of this paper to contribute to both the empirical and theoretical aspects of this discussion, by examining levels of structure and function in molecular biology and linguistics, and by developing, from parallelisms between these two areas, a hierarchical model of possibly greater generality. We consider first the hierarchy of spoken language [2]: phoneme, morpheme, word, sentence, utterance, discourse; or of written language: letter, syllable, word, sentence, paragraph, section, chapter, book. These lists are straightforward up to and including the "sentence," beyond which they are some

This paper reports on the findings of a piece of research work aimed at investigating and analysing the impact of