What is the Information Commons
The "Information Commons" as described herein refers to a permanent, ubiquitous data store which contains information about your town, city, country, local parks, rivers and streams, current water levels, news articles - pretty much everything you could ever need to build a working model of the world in cyberspace.
We already have data about geographic landforms, famous people, news articles, land use, roads, toxic releases and much more, which you can explore using the Civium Workbench.
Information added by a user can become instantly available to others (modulo physical limitations such as the speed of light). If you see your home town in the Workbench and want to add comments about it (such as recommendations of things to do and see), you can add this information and other users will be able to see your comments forever after. The Information Commons makes this kind of universal collaboration not only possible, but well-structured and hopefully even easy.
We are gradually but rapidly importing more physical information (accurate coastlines, river systems, elevations, geological structures, meteorological data ...) and human information (census and demographic data, health and disease statistics, locations of businesses and services, transportation routes and timetables...).
Why does it work?
The Information Commons combines the fluidity the World Wide Web with the power (but not the brittleness) of a highly-structured database. This is explained more throroughly in the general approach page.
The Information Commons has been very carefully designed to enable information to be universally represented. At the simplest level, there is only one basic information container, the u-form. Thus all information is represented by u-forms. This gives information a common language - or at least, a common form.
In order for this common form to really be a common language, we need to know how information is to be interpreted in context. This is achieved using role u-forms. Part of the Information Commons themselves, roles explain the way different parts of u-forms are used to represent different aspects of the real world.
U-forms and roles were invented by ![[WWW]](/wiki/classic/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
MAYA Design. The definition of a u-form is clear and fixed (and had better remain so). The structure of the role-system is constantly evolving as we add richer and more varied data to the Information Commons. As certain roles become more stable and widely used, they become permanently fixed in the conceptual framework.
What is the program?
Reinventing the Web?
Not at all. The web is a great resource for people and institutions to put up lots of information and opinions in human-readable form. But there is very little integration in the web. Information about a city's population, government, location, businesses and services, housing - these are all separate and often fragmented. In defining u-forms and roles for representing cities (e.g. by defining the attributes of a general Geo-Political Feature) we can make sure that whenever information about a city is added or enriched, the information is accessible to any information device that can interpret the common format.
For example, every physical object on the earth's surface should have a location that can be represented with latitiude and longitude coordinates. If this information is available anywhere in the commons, then there will be no more browsing a website and wondering where on earth a city/school/business is actually based - you will always be able to see the information in the correct place in the Workbench.
Spreading the Information Base
The Commons has lots of information - but only what people have put there. If you explore in the Workbench, you'll probably find that there's a lot more detail around Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania than in most areas. This is because most of the preliminary work has been done by MAYA Design for clients in the Pittsburgh region. (For example, see the 3RC Greenmap project.) The Information Commons needs to go broader and deeper - many of the information solutions that MAYA has pioneered for individual clients (such as regional Human Services providers) can be adapted to many other regions by adding the relevant information.
Joining the dots - Information and Globalization
So what's the big deal? What would you gain by putting in the effort to import your data to the Information Commons?
It's increasingly acknowledged that we live in a global environment. Not only because distant parts of the world affect one another, but because different kinds of information affect one another. To stay ahead in business, it's not enough to know the cost and profit in making a particular product or delivering a particular service. You need to know about the shifting attitudes in the marketplace, the national and international events that shape people's views - in many industries you even need to know a lot about the weather in different regions to determine if sales are likely to do down or up this year.
A lot of this connectedness is nothing new - an extra inch of rain in the Allegheny mountains gives rise to several extra inches of water in Pittsburgh's rivers about a day later, and if the same weather pattern is predicted for the following week you might be wise to buy an umbrella (or even invest in umbrella stocks). But to date, our use of information has been fragmentary at best. Imagine if you could correlate business locations with demographic data - not because you've invested in a specific project to do this for one client in one city, but because the information is readily available already. Imagine if the progress of protected species, and their foodsources, and their habitats could be easily correlated and their relationships monitored - not by a one-off data-integration project, but because such geographic information was already available in a common format.
We live in a world where relationships are global in extent and complexity. The Information Commons enables these relationships to be investigated and modeled in a universal framework. Far from limiting information to a few fixed methods of display and interaction, the universality of the Information Commons enables all sorts of data to be visualized and analyzed collaboratively, without extra-special software and applications that only work on one dataset or domain.
Finding out more
As well as navigating your way around this website, you can learn more about the goals and methods driving the Information Commons in the following paper:
Toward the Universal Database: U-forms and the VIA Repository. Peter Lucas and Jeff Senn. MAYA Design, 2002.
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