ESP 1.0 review

An ethics-enabled search engine can act as a complement to the well-known price search engines (a topic I have been working on earlie

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 19K Developer: Bernhard Fastenrath

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An ethics-enabled search engine can act as a complement to the well-known price search engines (a topic I have been working on earlier) and turn ethical considerations into an easily advertisable advantage. A search engine can store imprint and ethics of organizations that publish them and allow users to find organizations adhering to the desired ethics and also to verify these ethics or the public feedback of organizations or individuals that verify those ethics and an organization's adherance to its ethics in detail.

Users of this system can demand ethics and support non-government organization that try to uphold environmental, social or other ethics. Gathering data from user profiles is expected from search engines as users specify the ethics they are looking for and the policy providers, certification agents and verification agents they would like to see.

A search engine must return hits according to the quality of matching ethics, if no other criteria was specified to supercede this.

Unsatisfied users can post tickets in a well-defined format to policy providers or verification agents to remind policy implementors to adhere to the ethics they have published. Policy providers and verification agents can declare a published socialcontract.xml document as (partially) invalid or revoke (self-) certifications. Users can also annotate policies or social contracts and inform others about their private opinion about the adherence or non-adherence of a policy implementor. Mediators should be used to mediate in case of dispute as legal steps are frowned upon (there is a base policy that disallows legal steps where mediation would be appropriate) and can increase the number of negative annotations.

Policies can extend policy schemes (inherting the structure of an empty policy) or extend another policy that has not been declared final. A final policy is not open to be extended. Extending a policy means that paragraphs can be overridden or appended. The implementation of a policy refers to the use of a policy in a social contract.

In an analogy to the Java language one could refer to policy schemes as interfaces and policies as classes but where Java nomenclatur would be to implement a scheme (instead of extending it), the term "implement" refers to what would be the instantiation of a policy in Java, because a policy implementation is the act of adding a policy to one's social contract. Such an "instance" of a policy is parametrized by a single argument, which is the implementation level. Further parametrization may be added in the future, when the search facilities for policy parameters are sufficiently standardized.

Policies should be structured to describe concisely what is required by a policy, not why it is required or how it is to be implemented. It should be considered good style to add links to external web pages describing the why and how to every paragraph that requires further explanations. Explanations should preferrably come in different degrees of verbosity and sophistication but aim to explain the connection to Kant's Categorical Imperative.

What's New in This Release:
This release introduces namespace references.
Many static categorizations have been turned into namespace references with freely definable namespaces.
Many new types have been added for the representation of communities, advertisements, votings, local currencies, and HTML meta information.