The Dynamics of Concepts in a Homogeneous Community

• Main Authors: Eugene Khmelnitsky, Eugene Kagan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2013-05-01
• Series: Entropy
• Subjects: social networks; communities; information diffusion; concepts’ dynamics
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/6/2012

The paper addresses informational interactions in a community and considers the dynamics of concepts that represent distribution of knowledge among the individuals. The evolution of a set of concepts maintained by a community is derived by the use of the concepts’ significance in the communication between “cognoscenti” and “dilettanti” and of birth-death processes. The dynamics of concepts depend on the allocation of communication resources and can be governed by an informational principle that requires minimum self-information of the set of concepts over a time horizon. With respect to that principle, the introduction of a new concept into a community’s disposal is shown to lead to a steady-state self-information, which is smaller than that before the introduction of the new concept.