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One possibility is to recognise that once an interoperating community is established, it
can generate a large number of institutional facts. These institutional facts can be inter-
preted by any of the players who share the common ontology. These ontologies or insti-
tutional fact schemas constitute the atomic behavioural units, but do not necessarily
determine behaviour. The rules of chess determine what constitutes a chess game, but
there are lots of different games.
So we can use techniques like data mining that depend for their atomic data on the exact
classification/logical equality nature of institutional facts, but which can find emergent
patterns in the multiplicity of instances. These emergent patterns can be used as an im-
manent ontology for strategic or tactical decision making, for example advertising
campaigns to encourage or discourage behaviour patterns, or as evidence of undesirable
behaviour to be subjected to further investigation (e.g. fraud, money laundering).
Where the interoperating community consists of many small players, there may be an
advantage to each player giving up its exclusive access to the institutional facts it creates
in favour of a community-wide pool to which all players have common access. This is
common, for example, in real estate where individual sales reports and auction success
rates can be published for a whole city market area, enabling each player to see trends
to which they can respond in their own fashion.
The information spaces opened up in this way give great scope for the development of
interoperating autonomous intelligent agents. Each agent can develop its own immanent
ontology, which it uses to govern the strategies and tactics it uses to interoperate with
others to perform speech acts using the common transcendent ontology. The theory of
this paper predicts that a research and development program along these lines would
be likely to be productive.
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