Defining Cybernetics: Reflections on the Science of Governance

In this article, we have reconsidered the meaning of cybernetics and provided a taxonomy that can be useful for us to understand various cybernetics more clearly. We have also investigated some fundamental properties of governable or self-governable distributed systems. In particular, we believe that ontology plays a key role for a distributed system to become governable or even self-governable. We think that automatic construction of a good ontology in a distributed system is an interesting topic for further study. In fact, constructing a good ontology for a mobile communication network, a social network, a traffic control network, and any network related to our daily lives is important to make the network governable, safe, and secure. For large-scale distributed systems (e.g., the Internet), certain self-governability is also indispensable for the network to be more reliable or dependable. Of course, full self-governability of these systems may not be expected from the point of view of human beings.