Re: Catalog of agents

[glen e. p. ropella]

John A. Lopez writes:
 > I think this is more than an excellent idea, since this list would
 > necessarily evolve to discipline-specific lists. Such posted methods
 > could be improved upon or varied in ways which could form the basis of a
 > dialog (parallelog?) within a research discipline (mine is
 > anthropology/archaeology). I'd be more than happy to post my kinship,
 > mimicry, and the other behavioral methods I've developed or am working
 > on.
 > 
 > In light of the recent discussion regarding future funding and
 > non-profit organization structure, we could take a lesson from Swarm.
 > This idea of a methods listing could be a source for SFI income: users
 > could pay some individual or institutional fee for specific downloads of
 > methods (available free to contributers within a class of course).
 > Perhaps the SFI folks could continue to make its server available and
 > act as a GA and cull those discussions which have little or no 
 > interest.

Hmmmm.  This would complement the idea that someone had during
SwarmFest of providing an archiving service of source code.
The suggestion was that, since part of Swarm's purpose is to
help with the documentation and repeatability aspects of doing
research via simulation, it would help to have some repository
in which simulants could deposit their source code for posterity.

Along these lines, it would be reasonable to assume that the 
swarm.org organize and manage this repository as well as some
kind of Agent-Reuse library/catalog, as mentioned above.

Charging for this service wouldn't be a bad idea, at all.  There
are three ways that could be done:  1) charge the researcher 
for archiving his stuff (this wouldn't be effective for the 
agent catalog but might be ok for registering simulations),
2) charging for access to the database, or 3) grant style funding,
where money is sought from institutions who have an interest in
making simulation more mature.

glen


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