Epistemic Communities: Description and Hierarchic Categorization

Complexity Digest 2004.37 - 05

13-Sep-2004

Epistemic Communities: Description and Hierarchic Categorization, arXiv

Excerpts: Social scientists have shown an increasing interest in understanding the structure of knowledge communities, and particularly the organization of "epistemic communities", that is groups of agents sharing common knowledge concerns. (...) we introduce a formal framework (...) and propose a method (...) for categorizing epistemic communities in an automated and hierarchically structured fashion. Suggesting that our process allows us to rebuild a whole community structure and taxonomy, and notably fields and subfields gathering a certain proportion of agents, we eventually apply it to empirical data to exhibit these alleged structural properties, and successfully compare our results with categories spontaneously given by domain experts.

Source: Epistemic Communities: Description and Hierarchic Categorization
[ http://arXiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0409013 ], Camille Roth, Paul Bourgine, DOI: nlin.AO/0409013, arXiv, 2004/09/06