Endorsement

The application of mnemonic tokens to entities in a computational model.  In a declarative, rule-based model, there will be rules determining the conditions in which these tokens will be associated with particular entities.  The form of the association will normally be the assertion of a fact on a fact base including the token, the entity being endorsed and and endorsement scheme for the evaluation of collections of endorsements.  The evaluation can take one of several forms, all of which involve a partial ordering of endorsement tokens.  In some schemes, the most valuable collection of endorsements might be the collection with the largest number of tokens from the most preferred class of tokens.  In other schemes, numerical values might be assigned to each class of tokens and then some algorithm used to determine an overall value of any collection of endorsements. The point is to be able to understand why one entity was chosen over others in terms that are comprehensible as natural language.