Communication-Oriented Modelling

The COM-Project

The COM-Project explores a new approach into socionics and multi-agent systems research and design: communication-oriented modelling (COM). This methodological framework shall complement and reinforce agent-based modelling (AOM). In large-scale communication processes, especially those running on the Internet like discussion groups or chats, interaction between participants often is not organized along the lines of agent-to-agent relations. Rather, we find patterns of communication organized along the lines of message-to-message relations. Specifically, this can be observed in Internet-based public debates shaped by interrelated messages where a widely shared argumentation or a common view on a topic of general interest is gradually established.

For an introduction see:

Thomas Malsch and Christoph Schlieder. Communication without Agents? From Agent-Oriented to Communication-Oriented Modeling. In: Regulated Agent-Based Social Systems: First International Workshop, RASTA 2002, Bologna, Italy, July 16, 2002, Revised Selected and Invited Papers. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, pp. 113-133.

Comte

The COM Test Environment.

The Simulation

Comte is the implementation of COM, particularly it is a simulation tool to analyze various aspects of the COM theory. The current version of Comte (0.3, but useable) simulates the cycle of message threads in time.

In each time step an number of new messages is created which refer to older messages in the thread. This corresponds to postings in an usenet newsgroup, where a followup posting has a reference to the source posting, but also to scientific papers, where each paper cites a number of other papers in its bibliography.

Some of the messages are more visible than others (some publications are to be known by many scientists, others are nearly unrecognized), and new messages are more likely to refer to older messages with high than with low visibility.

Each cycle of the simulation consists of two steps:

1. Calculate the current visibility of all messages.
2. Create new messages with references to older messages based on this visibilities.

These two steps determine the resulting message and reference structure, by changing the visibility function and/or the distribution (message creation) function other threads are generated.

From Functions And Patterns

The visibility of a message can be calculated in several ways. Old messages may be less visible than new ones (aging), the visibility of a message M may depend on the number of messages referring M (degree) or on the visibilities of the messages referring M (PageRank), and many other measures are conceivable. In Comte the user is able to select one of many visibility functions and to change parameters determining the influence of certain aspects.

The second step, the creation of new messages (distribution) may also be modified by the user: how many messages should be createt in each cycle, how many references may each message generate and which messages are referenced?

All these settings change the created message thread. Highly dependend on the selected functions and parameter sets different patterns are generated:

The modernist pattern:

Only new messages are visible.

This is easily achieved by an age-dependend visibility function.

The historicist pattern:

The oldest messages are most visible (bible style).

Also simple to produce. Just calculate the visibility of a message by the number of references it gets (degree or PageRank) and let new messages create references to the most visible messages. At the start of the thread the first messages automatically are referenced (there are no others available), so they have the highest degree (and consequently a high visibility) and therefor are selected in further cycles.

The classicist pattern:

The few most visible messages are spread over the whole time scale and not clustered in one age (there is one important publication all 10 years).

This is the most difficult of this three patterns to archive. To get stable classics some kind of degree or PageRank visibility function is needed, and to avoid a bible style clustering aging has to be added.

We certainly could just create a message with a high visibility randomly from time to time, but this would be fake, the visibility function should correspond to the thread structure in some way.

Certainly there are many more patterns possible.

Play Comte

Here you find a version of Comte as java applet (java 1.4 needed!). You are invited to play around, change parameters and try different visibility functions. Try to generate modernist and historicist patterns and with some fiddling on the parameters you may get the classicist pattern (the default values of the degree function are a good starting point). Try also to change the parameters of the distribution function. What happens if less messages are generated each cycle? If more references are created?

A detailed description of the visibility functions and the various parameters is given in in the following pdf: ComteVisibilityFunctions.pdf.

The Comte applet

Have fun.

The jar-file for off-line use

Comte.jar

You need Java 1.4 to run Comte.

Please report bugs (and interesting parameters/patterns) to klaus.stein@wiai.uni-bamberg.de.