In order to describe the origins and initial workings of a world system, I have had to argue a certain conception of a world-system. A world-system is a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of the conflicting forces which hold it together by tension and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold i...

the multilateral trading system as a sub-system of the present international system from its beginning as gatt in 1947, after scond world war, until now have been criticized by different countries. with the conversion of gatt into the wto in 1994, not only dissatisfaction of the countries with the performance of multilateral trading system have not gone away, but in many cases also have increas...

Geographic data, stored and processed in a GIS, form a conceptual model of the real world. The abstraction of the real world to construct the conceptual model unavoidably results in differentiation between objects of the real world and their representation in GIS (i.e., computer). Since classical set theory is used in conventional GIS software systems to model uncertain real world, the natural ...

We describe a model of utility-based agents that synthesizes information and determines the best way to make decisions in multi-agent systems. In this model, the beliefs are decomposed into two levels. The higher level represents the possible information about the possible worlds. The lower level subsequently estimates a number function for the belief. We also present a decision theory for this...