Glossary

From CommerceNet Wiki

• agoric
  • The agora, or Greek marketplace, was used as a central place for public assembly and commerce. There is a marked trend towards the development of agoric systems - social software that enables community and resource sharing simultaneously.
  • See: Agoric Architectual Styles for Decentralized Space Exploration (PDF)
• business service networks
  • Businesses can be broken down into functions, and these functions turned into services that can be used over the Internet. Loose federations of these services enable entirely new ways of doing business that are revolutionary and evolutionary at once.
  • See: Business Service Networks: Delivering the Promises of B2B (PDF)
• decentralized
  • Decentralization is a key theme in the current evolution of the net. It means being responsive and flexible without stakeholders or complete knowledge by any one party. It also implies diversity in systems and dynamic problem-solving.
  • See: zLab, CommerceNet's decentralization lab
• ecosystem
  • The most adaptable - and thus long-lasting - systems are made of diverse, decentralized, yet interdependent parts, as in an ecosystem. What lessons can we take from ecosystems that will allow us to build software that lasts 100, 200 years?
• event-driven
  • Today's net-enabled applications must become more alive, responding to real-time actions and dealing with real-world constraints.
  • Software that enables instant mass collaboration, cooperation, and planning will be a vital part of tomorrow's Web.
  • See: the Event-Driven Economy (PDF)
• ignition starts
  • CommerceNet actively invests in ignition starts, in which we help cash-poor, idea-rich entrepreneurs get past the "just a concept" stage, in exchange for equity.
  • Thanks to the rise of open source software and outsourcable business infrastructure, ignitions comprise an ever-growing part of the dot-com startup universe.
  • See: CommerceNet initiatives
• microformats
  • Simple, open, need-driven data formats can define all manner of people, places and things. Not only are they human-viewable, but human-writable as well. Imagine posting "things I want" and "things I'm selling" lists on your blog as microformats, allowing all manner of services to fulfill your requests.
  • See: microformats.org
• personal medicine
  • Healthcare services coupled with personal medical applications and social networking will bring about a sea change in how people treat their own health - they will have more resources than ever to help them stay informed and be supported at all stages of their life.
  • See: Smart Health: A Flexible, Open Path to Community Health Interoperability (PDF)
• predictive markets
  • We're developing toolkits that allow people to create dynamic markets which forecast needs and work efficiently in decentralized, information-sparse environments.
  • Predictive markets eliminate the need for central authority and arbitration, enabling millions of spontaneous spot markets to bloom in the digital field of the Internet.
  • See: Zocalo
• pubsub
  • Millions of people use RSS to consume information, but publishing remains a difficult, centralized task. Let's make tools that enable net-wide publish/subscribe infrastructures.
  • See: the mod_pubsub blog
• reputation
  • Online, how can I tell if someone is trustworthy? Reputation is a core component to the next evolution of the Web - reliable reputation services will enable more secure, private processes, allowing people to be confident that the information they send and receive is reliable and trusted.
• RFID
  • Radio Frequency IDentification technology coupled with next-generation Web concepts (pubsub, business service networks, decentralization) is nothing less than the first real merging of the "slow" physical world of things with the "fast" digital world of bits. It will fundamentally change how producers and consumers view the "real" world.
• semantic web 2.0
  • Web services have proven to be way too complex. Let's merge the best of today's new Web with a bit of AI to create a Web of knowledge services driven by human-centric needs and information.
  • New tools will bridge the gap between ontologies and folksonomies, between complex, rigid, formal systems and simple, flexible, informal ones.
  • See: the Semantic Web 2.0 wiki
• service-oriented architectures
  • Systems made of functionally discrete composable parts are reusable, maintainable, and interoperable while maintaining scalability. By making use of SOAs organizations can do more complex things at much lower costs.
• wheat
  • What if writing an application were as easy as writing in a blog or a wiki? The Wheat project explores this question and hints at a future in which programs are written using hypermedia and the boundaries between developers and users are blurred.
  • See: the Wheat project