The Carley Model of Information Sharing

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Connections in the Carley Model

The society model proposed in "A Theory of Group Stability" uses the idea that people, or agents, tend to interact with similar agents. More precisely, agents tend to interact with partners that have similar types of knowledge. Such knowledge "types" might include legal practices, in the case of a network of lawyers, religious ideas, in the case of a local church congregation, or secret rituals, in the case of an underground secret society.

Every such group of people has a particular set of knowledge that is associated with inclusion in that group. Rather than conceptualizing a continuum of knowledge, we instead assume that agents in a group know a certain set of distinct facts. Each agent either knows a fact or he does not.

For example, inclusion in a group of physicists might involve knowledge of a certain set of facts about the universe. Each physicist might not know all the facts, but all the physicists who interact with each other will have a large number of these facts in common.

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