Voice of Humanity and the Information Commons? 2 comments

1 Oct 2006 @ 18:24, by Roger Eaton The MAYA Information Commons is a major project with global application from MAYA Design, a design consultancy and technology research lab spun out of Carnegie-Mellon University. Here is MAYA's Josh Knauer speaking on the Info Commons at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference. The Information Commons is based on the uform, as its information atom. See also the Magic behind the Commons. The uform is simply an extensible list of property/value pairs with a UUID handle as a unique key that can be created without reference to any central key repository. The tricky part that makes the design work is that uforms may have properties whose values are the UUIDs for other uforms. Using this trick, uforms called “Roles” provide metadata for other uforms, and, stop right there, doesn't that seem a much better foundation for the Semantic Web than rdf? Here is a link to a previous article about the Semantic Web. The Commons is designed to be a distributed bottom up semantic information space that is “future proof”. Roles can be redone relatively easily, so the same information fits into a different semantic or organizational framework. New waves of thought can repurpose great sections of information without disturbing the previous order. All this makes the Information Commons a natural direction for the Voice of Humanity project. But even though it is much simpler than rdf, the uform is still technical enough that we will need some help, so the question is, will MAYA be interested to provide us with that help? Their business is precisely advice and help for complicated information driven projects that need good user interfaces, and they are very well connected in the non-profit world, so could we together get a grant? Hmm... There is after all a common outsizedness of goal for both the Information Commons and the Voice of Humanity. Perhaps together we can accomplish what neither could alone.

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