Situating COIN in the cloud (invited paper)

Abstract

We start from the view that the central theme of the research at the core of coordination, organization, institutions and norms, is whether the social structures and mechanisms, that have emerged over time, can be adapted and applied to artificial societies of programs and perhaps more significantly, to mixed societies of humans and programs -and how The means by which the social constraints that guide and regulate behaviour are acquired and represented remains an open problem. If recent experiences in information retrieval and natural language processing are plausible indicators, the statistical may yet oust the logical. Technology aside, it is clear that for socio-technical systems, that integrate human and software components, we may expect the adoption of, or the illusion of observation of, and support for human social conventions. The growing migration to cloud computing of the services that make up current pervasive, social applications suggests near-term developments emerging from the same platform(s). Thus, the question considered here is, what pathways, opportunities and challenges exist for the development, wider use and validation of COIN technologies to help realize socio-technical systems that better meet human requirements. As examples of specific enabling technologies, we review current developments in resource-oriented architecture, complex event processing and stream reasoning and observe how COIN technologies might integrate with them. © Springer-Verlag 2013.