The medium and the message

[Leigh Dodds <ldodds@ingenta.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Aaron Swartz [mailto:aswartz@swartzfam.com]
> Sent: 17 July 2000 16:53
> To: syndication@egroups.com
> Subject: Re: [syndication] Sneak Preview: my.info
>
>
> Leigh Dodds <ldodds@ingenta.com> wrote:
>
> > In most cases you care about who (or what) wrote the information not
> > from where it came from (i.e. who sent it, or how you got it).
>
> Exactly. Then this opens up the possibility of services (like my.info, to
> tie this back to the subject line) which provide the information,
> but don't create it.

<paranoia>Please don't take my comments as knocking my.info, its a
very nice site :)</paranoia>

> Instead, they can use XML to get the information for other,
> trusted providers and serve it up for you in the way you want.

At the moment all providers are 'trusted' i.e. of equal worth. What's
needed is a way to assign a 'trustworthiness' to particular information
sources. Who is reliable? Who do others consider to be reliable?, Who
is a first hand source and who is merely repeating information?

Its the natural next step to news and content syndication I believe.
Everyone now has a printing press of their very own, so how do
you assign value, worth, reliability, etc?

> The source is certainly part of the information -- the medium, and the
information
> provider, I'm not so sure.

Depends whether you trust the information carrier. Is there a possibility
that
the information could have been tampered with? This is where digital
signatures
apply I suppose.

[In the case of knowledge management and RDF, if the
information is derived from (for example) a series of RDF assertions then I
think
it'd be important to be able to trace these back to determine their
(continued) truth.
To me thats another important facet to RDF - traceability]

This is probably straying way off topic for this list, so I'll cease and
desist
at this point and resume lurking.

Cheers,

L.

--
Leigh Dodds, Systems Architect       | "Pluralitas non est ponenda
http://weblogs.userland.com/eclectic |    sine necessitates"
http://www.xml.com/pub/xmldeviant    |     -- William of Ockham