Trying to clarify Agent
Please don't merge without some discussion, and also fixing of the .ttl file.
This PR is to see if we can agree on the Agent portion of the model for release 0.1. I tried to add text to explain how "we" (of differing views) see it. I tried to honor the most recent discussion, as well as the very long discussions we had early in the VF project. I tried to be clear, but of course welcome feedback and clarifications!
Excerpt We also want to acknowledge that some people prefer to think of themselves as independent and decentralized agents who interact freely in different places in the economy as individuals, and some people think of themselves more as members of different groups and networks and communities and interact more in the context of those groups and networks and communities. Many experiments are going on as people strive towards a better economy. We want to support all these experiments, so want to support both of these ways of thinking and organizing ourselves. The agent vocabulary is very flexible, and will support these as well as current conventional structures.
So, if people want to form a group that has agency as a group, fine. If people want to consider that their group does not have agency as a group, also fine. Not all groups, and especially not all networks, will be vf:Agents. That depends on the agreement of the people in the group. Note that within the vocabulary, network formations will appear, as agents have economic interactions with each other in the world. This does not mean that the network is necessarily a vf:Agent. End excerpt
I removed Elio's network of networks picture from the readme, to back off the emphasis and because it has specifics I think we don't want to include. Left Bob's in the Flows of Resources page so the concept is represented.
I also changed to foaf.
And I included foaf:Agent, foaf:Group, foaf:Organization, foaf:Person. I hope that we can agree that many people see this as useful and worth including for that reason. I'm also OK with vf:GroupAgent, but think it is less important to be crystal clear than to re-use fairly standard terms - at least in this case. :)
I added explicit verbs for the main behaviors of agent relationships - member of, part of, peer of. I called these AgentRelationshipVerb, and would like a better name! I added them to the .ttl file for discussion, but haven't gotten the inverses in yet, see comments in https://github.com/valueflows/valueflows/issues/52. Want to do that, but figured I'd get this out there for feedback before spending more time. Probably need to fix something too, doesn't load in webvowl, and I'm using the right version now... :(
I changed the name from vf:Relationship to vf:AgentRelationship, expecting we will have other kinds of relationships that will look pretty different, and to make the name very clear to minimize confusion.
OK! Let me have it! :)