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zur deutschen Fassung
The aim of the research enterprise is to
study the mechanism of inspiration via social metaphors in the
course of innovation of "Distributed Artificial Intelligence"
and its potential from a techno-sociological
perspective. Since the establishment of DAI roughly 15 years ago social
metaphors play an important
role in the work of this novel field of research. This is reason enough
to ask whether the recourse on
social metaphors is merely rhetoric or whether it has actual innovative
implications for the technological
development of distributed intelligent systems. Is it possible for phenomena
of social life to serve as
guidelines or sources of inspiration to produce new technologies?
The main focus of the project lies
on the problem of the direct or indirect exploitability of social metaphors
and sociological concepts for
the development of technological distributed information and communication
systems. In particular we
want to emphasise the course of innovation we call "migration of metaphors":
the creative conversion
of social metaphors into technological innovations, which do not reflect
the underlying metaphor. It is
planned to reconstruct empirically the innovative implications of social
metaphors in DAI by applying
qualitative and quantitative analyses of the DAI-literature. To this end
problem-oriented interviews of
experts will be performed to find out about the change from social metaphors
with social reference to
ones with computer science reference.