<template
match=“supervisor”>
<replace> Suzan </replace>
</template>
What they are
doing, as you can see, is following a sort of recipe that says “find where the
supervisor name is and replace that name by Suzan.” The recipe, like everything
we’ve seen so far, is itself written in XML, which means that the computer can
manipulate this template in such the same way as it can manipulate the content
of messages. Similarly, we humans can follow recipes (templates) to perform
particular actions, and one action we may want to perform is to change a recipe
itself.
Well, now, we
have really greatly oversimplified, but we hope you get the idea. With XML,
computers can understand each other, they can search and interpret information,
and they can manipulate data to create new information. And as they can do so,
they have a means to express the ontology of social ecosystems that we
discussed earlier in this chapter.
So, our
considerations thus far have given us a cursory understanding of social ecosystems.
We see from our high-level model of such systems the characteristics and
mechanisms through which needs based stimuli can give rise to actions aimed at
satisfying various appetites. We can now consider the sustenance needed to sate
these appetites; sustenance that we will refer to quite generically as content.
And, that’s the topic for the next chapter.
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