The Digital Messenger

Synopsis1

Introduction

The Initial Paradox

Information is everywhere and is indispensable for almost everything today but there is practically no accountability and no security. This book discusses conceptual tools to analyze that situation and proposes ways to fix it.

Part I Symptoms: The Digital Mess

The Information Revolution changes everything

We have witnessed radical changes in the last twenty years, as information technologies have invaded all sectors or our personal and professional life. But we are in a disbalanced situation, because the legal and accounting mechanisms have not yet adjusted to the new situation.

Horror Stories

Big Brother is here. Our individual freedoms are threatened. Propaganda and fake news are spreading as never before. Kids are intoxicated.

Information creates new challenges: technology ignores national borders, voting systems, and is overall vulnerable to attackers. Computers don't really "understand" anything. We can be overwhelmed by infoglut and sometimes left in the dark while looking for relevant, critical information. Technicians have too much power in influencing decision making.

Capital concentration in the hands of a small number of huge corporations dominates the market. These companies have sometimes more power than governments. Mostly unregulated, their good will is what rules our world today.

The Digital Mess

The IT industry and the information industry. Top-down, corporate-wide, global IT products are becoming obsolete. Component-based, open source technologies, are gaining traction. At the same time, technical complexity increases.

Maintenance procrastination provokes obsolescence. Neglect becomes expensive over time. Computer models are rigid.

We will rely more and more on computers to do many things humans were doing not so long ago, including driving cars or trucks. The Internet of Things, relying on artificial intelligence, is getting smarter thanks to Machine Learning. But the more it grows, the more messy we get, because basic features, such as security, are still overlooked. While looking for solutions, we are generating bigger problems.

The fascination for something new vanishes over time. Even in a period as short as 20 years, we have learned a lot and have now some clues on how to understand how to handle information. There are 2 contradictory trends: the lust for more and more innovation and tools, and the awareness that some of the new instruments we have need already a serious overhaul.

Part II Remedies: The Digital Messenger

Introduction: Remedy

List domains where control over information content is critical: healthcare, intelligence, technical documentation, security, preserving individual rights and privacy. Instead of protect against attacks after they occur, design systems that are more resilient and don't accept attacks, by design. No need to ask technicians to take control on one's information content. Make information accountable. Enable multiple perspectives, use bottom-up integration to welcome new content.

Subject Integration

Communication is based on sharing a common language, common values, and trust that the meaning of what we say gets across. Computers don't really "understand" anything, but they show us something that resembles it. Still, we should not forget that they are only machines. Describe information from an outside layer. Decentralized network-based information qualification. Integrate subject by meaning, not by name.

Going deeper with information: Enable Diversity, plurality, multiple languages, multiple points of views are a given. It's not a bug, it's a feature, even if it's complicated for computers to handle them.

Subjects should be integrated, but by respecting a plurality of perspectives. It should be merged with the chapter called "E Pluribus Unum".

Either you preorganize information, but that necessitates consensus among a community, a group of users, or you don't organize and then you need to rely on information provided by automatic algorithms that are out of your reach. If you decide to organize knowledge a certain way, then it means that there is an implicit world view which may or not be shared by everyone, and basically everybody needs to pre-agree on a set of common values. That may or not be possible. You need the equivalent of a "constitution". If it's not explicit, then you are imposing a vision that you suppose is shared but in fact is not.

Checks and balances

Bloomberg Submission

Design and deploy accountable information systems. Apply to information what works with money: the method of recording transactions using double entry accounting, to explain where money comes from, and where it goes. This requirement may overload the current capabilities of computers we have now, but more powerful computers are looming on the horizon and we'll have the capacity to significantly increase the details of the operations they will be able to perform, in order to give us a much higher level of accountability.
The Data Projection Model: How it works and some examples.
_Introduction to the Data Projection Model. REDUNDANT
Foundations of the Data Projection Model.

Security and Auditability Standards and Applications

Blockchain, Security standards

Confronting the unexpected: Security

From reactive to proactive. The Internet is often deemed "insecure" because it's open. But it's not the way it is designed that makes it insecure, it's the way it is used. It is possible to envision a secure architecture for an open society. Strict accounting rules do not prevent free trade. On the contrary, they guarantee its success. Information can be adjusted to follow a similar path.

Individual rights and privacy

Solutions on how to improve individual rights and privacy. If nothing prevents recording everybody's activities, why wouldn't the Internet giants refrain from doing it, if they can monetize the valuable information they accumulate. There seems to be a consensus to accept that since we get powerful tools for free, such as Facebook or Google, we shouldn't complain if they use our information. But the lack of transparency is the major obstacle. We should know what we sign for, and some regulation may be a good way to achieve this goal.

Business and Trust

E-Knowledge, Digital Rights Management, Published Subjects, Linked Open Data

In an era where everybody can become their own publisher, with the protection of the First Amendment, there is an explosion of trolling, harassment, rumor spreading, fake news, political propaganda, that spreads all over the Internet. Wikipedia is a good example of a self-regulated publishing operation, where transparency is necessary to track who wrote what, and be able to correct false or misleading information. The role of publishers, who put their reputation at stake when they decide to make a work public, should be re-instantiated on the Internet, where trust could be derived from a set of rules explicitely expressed by the originators.

Healthcare

Healthcare costs spiral out of control. Since the healthcare industry amounts for 1/6 of the US economy, the number of stakeholders is enormous. Integrating data coming from them using new approaches could provide a level of accountability that is necessary to start reducing the costs. This involves classic accounting as well as information accounting.

Part III: The State of the Art

Besides the "visionary" perspective presented in this book, there is a reality where we find ourselves today, with major trends in the information industry. Some of them continue to illustrate old paradigms disguised in new clothes, some are just the hit of the moment, others show long time trends. Here is an analysis of the big trends we are seeing happening today, before our eyes.

Can we held the Cloud accountable?

Managing information on the Cloud delegates management of its systems to the company which owns the server. But managing information account can be done regardless where the information is physically stored.

Data Analysis and Big Data

BitCoin and BlockChain

The heritage of print: from text to structure

The purpose of this chapter is to show that many of the concepts we are using to describe online information is inherited from the tradition of printing. But the technology constraints emanating from online are different from print. This affects the publishing industry as an industry, the notion of copyright, of how to sale information, how to ensure trusttext/. Most mechanisms valid today have been created to fit the print technology. Some of them need to be reinvented. Conceptually speaking, structure is at the core of printing and at the core of computing. But it's not necessary the same. From typesetting to computerized typesetting to SGML to XML and HTML. Where are we now?

The Digital World

Search engines, Full text search, Clustering Techniques, Text mining, information extraction and retrieval, text categorization, artificial intelligence, data analysis, hypertext/media and the web, predicate logic.

The Semantic Web

A critical view of the Semantic Web. Semantic interoperability. RDF and Topic maps

The Knowledge Organizers

Taxonomies, ontologies, library catalogs, controlled vocabularies. Challenges of uniqueness, universality, stability. Tacit knowledge. Crowd tagging (Folksonomies).

Microscope

For auditing purposes, open another set of layers.

Part IV: The Future

Invisible layers

Philosophical foundations: Thing, Subject, Aboutness, Expression, Interpretation, Perspective, View

Leibniz and the principle of indiscernibles.

Knowledge Networking

Decentralized knowledge sharing consists in a decentralized knowledge management architecture which mimics the architecture of the Internet network.

Information Accounting Experimentation

In preparation for full accountability requiring quantum computers, we can start to perform limited scale experiments based on samples of information where the effects of accountability can be seen immediately.

Practical methodology

From Theory to Practice. Conceptual Principles for Deployment.

Part V: The Past

Book Navigational Aids

History: Notes on "The Influence of the Concepts of Ordination and Compilatio on the Development of the Book", by Malcolm Beckwith Parkes.

The Renaissance: expansion of commerce and the arts

New ways of painting: invention of perspective. Leonardo and Luca Pacioli.

Part VI: Reference Materials

Documentation

Bibliography and Reference materials

Miscellaneous

Various old versions and discarded materials