Re: Robustness Check and "A growing body of ad-hoc analysis solutions"

[Benedikt Stefansson]

> B> I would be happy and eager to enter into discussion about the
> B> standardization part (i.e. "growing body of ad-hoc analysis
> B> solutions").
> 
> I think Ferdinando Villa's IMA proposal would be a good foundation for
> standardization work.
> 
> http://kabir.cbl.umces.edu/~villa/IMA
> 
> Given a IMA description of an experiment (in XML) and IMA-compatible
> tools, a modeler could feasibly use more tools.> 

I agree that since XML is taking off as a standard, providing tools both
to load and save XML datatypes would be a good idea. 

In the short term however we must try to weigh power, standardization
and flexibility against 'user friendliness'. This is the eternal
question: is Swarm a tool for the mainstream which includes people which
don't want to invest hundreds of hours in learning new languages,
software and operating systems?

Again, in practical terms, the design paradigm should take note of what
is sound about the ObjectLoader approach. It is admitedly ad hoc and
incompatible, but couldn't be simpler to use. You have a simple  ASCII
file format for loading and saving, and the user can drop in a one liner
to the code which does all the work. 
 
> Roughly speaking, the goal of IMA is to figure out what objects,
> methodologies, data types, and procedures, are common across the board
> (e.g. the notion of a treatment) and what should be extensions
> (e.g. visualizing distance geometry, ABM, a mammal).  Then, with some
> of the conceptual work in hand, go ahead and invent a language for
> describing this taxonomy in XML, implementing standard parsing
> libraries for using it in real tools like Swarm.

I agree that this is also the way to go in the future, to go back to the
original Swarm paradigm of seperation between model and interface, and
to emphasize a paradigm neutral description of models which can be
presented, manipulated and analyzed with a wide range of standard tools.

Looking ahead to Swarm 2.0; once we introduce a new front end
programming language (Java) the original point 'let's all talk in terms
of the same language and objects' is moot. 

This is a Bad Thing, because the intent was to help tear down the Tower
of Babel which is computational modeling. 

However, experience has shown that discussion in the Swarm community is
usually focused on two widely seperated levels of abstraction. The low
tech (as in 'help me to install', 'help me to debug this routine') or
the high tech ('so what is agent based modeling all about?'). 

The reason for this development is perhaps that people are not
fundamentally interested in looking at actual code, the key is in the
presentation of both implementation and results at the proper level of
abstraction. IMA, MAML and the work that the hive is doing on backend
interfaces to standardized languages and data formats is of course
instrumental in this effort.

-Benedikt
 

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