Essential Elements of Noosphere

This document can be considered a response to Douglas Englebart's Essential Elements of an Open Hyperdocument System. It outlines features which when combined seem to provide the foundation for a self-organizing information system which might actually accelerate the evolution of knowledge, possibly to runaway.

Criteria and Evaluations

The key feature is that entities (ideas, facts, claims) in the system are able to be evaluated by users according to any criterion which is applicable to entities of that type. This is a profound capability, because the resulting collection of evaluations can be used both to filter what is seen or to guide how things are seen. So finding the 'good stuff', the new stuff, or any other kind of stuff becomes easy. Notice how people filtering ideas based on evaluations constitutes a variety of 'artificial selection' (because it is applied by intelligent human agents) which is analogous to the natural selection pressure applied to species competing for a niche. Criteria and Evaluations establish Nooron not only as a tool for exploring the space of ideas, but also as a system for comparing their fitness.

Vantages

A vantage is a canned query which in its simplest form merely constrains against intrinsic attributes of entities such as author, date of creation, document type and so on. In its most powerful form a Vantage is a query which constrains against evaluations of entities. Vantages specify whose evaluations to heed, how to summarize them (average, min, max, etc), when the evaluation was performed and so on. For example FIXME

WorldViews

FIXME To make it easier to create useful and understandable depictions, Worldviews were created. Worldviews are just named collections of weighted criteria sets which embody a way of thinking about the world (Fiscal Conservative, Deep Ecologist, Single Mom, Hopi Medicine Man, etc.) so it is easy to take a look at things from that perspective. If depictions are a particular perspective on particular data, then Worldviews are particular perspectives which can be used on any data. Of course, just like most things in TIE Worldviews are subject to evolutionary pressure so that useful ones can be expected to come into existence and individual ones can be expected to get better at embodying their unique perspective. Worldviews make TIE into an unprecedentedly powerful system for exploring familiar territory in new ways or new territory in familiar ways.

Depictions

When evaluations and other information about frames are mapped onto the various characteristics (x-position, y-position, line thickness, border color, font face, etc.) of a diagram (such as a scatter plot or a flowchart or most other kinds of info-graphic) it is possible to coherently present a huge amount of information to the user. Since depictions themselves can be easily created, saved, shared, evaluated and consequently evolved, they become powerful tools for letting people explore, recommend and consider diverse perspectives on shared knowledge.

Knowledge Representation

Using this technique from the artificial intelligence community makes it possible to store just about any kind of concept, claim, statement or datum in a fashion which is 'understandable' to a computer. Knowledge Representation means Nooron starts off as a general-purpose container for ideas and consequently a platform for nearly any kind of application.

Versioning

By making it possible for versions or 'mutations' of ideas to be created by its users and then compared against the other versions of that idea, Nooron makes it possible for the expression of individual ideas to undergo a process of refinement nicely analogous to that which genes undergo. The presence of a variety of differing expressions (versions) of each idea makes it feasible to view a forum in the fashion most appropriate at the moment. Users could just specify that each idea be represented by whatever version is, for example; clearest, shortest, most accurate, funniest, or most understandable to Russians. Versioning works in concert with Criteria and Evaluations and the 'artificial selection' pressure that critical human minds can apply to improve the quality of the ideas in Nooron. Versioning makes Nooron into a system for the evolution of ideas.

Distributed Knowledge Architecture

Nooron as described above is useful for small numbers of users working on private projects. It would clearly be desireable for the power of Nooron to be applicable 'in the large'. To deal with large numbers (either of users, forums or ideas in each project) it is necessary for Nooron to flexibly access more knowledge than is practical to store on an individual machine. Its Distributed Knowledge Architecture (a scheme rather like a knowledge-based DNS with mirroring and failover) makes Nooron into a scalable system fit for managing the very largest projects.

Extensible Architecture

To make it possible for Nooron to present specialized information to specialists in familiar ways it is necessary for Nooron to be extensible. It is important that it be easy to add new graphing modes, logic or data entry widgets and have them be automatically download-able when they are needed. Again, as with most Nooron components, these extensions can have criteria and evaluations applied to them and are consequently subject to evolutionary pressure. A standards-based extensible architecture makes Nooron into a general purpose platform for application delivery.

Personal Signature Encryption

Using public key cryptography so that users can sign entities they create as well as evaluations they perform confers properties such as authentication and non-repudiability to the system.

Aggressively Free License

To make it practical and feasible for programmers to volunteer to add features to Nooron, even such elementary things as new diagram styles, it is necessary for the programmers to be able to have confidence that their work, though (probably) unpaid will at least be appreciated and not 'stolen' from them by being made some license holders property. It is for these reasons (and many other excellent ones) that making Nooron a piece of freeware with an aggressively free license such as the GPL is prudent. Making Nooron freeware gives programmers good reasons to contribute, including: knowledge that their work has lasting relevance, give them a way to do 'good work', provide a venue for achieving peer recognition, etc.