The Information Commons is a universal database to which anyone can contribute, and which liberates information by abandoning relational databasing and the client-server computing model, according to the white paper. It has been under development at Maya Design for over 15 years as the result of a $50 million research contract from DARPA to pursue "information liquidity," or the flow of information in distributed computing environments. Their goal is to build a scalable information space that can support trillions of devices. I spoke today with Josh Knauer, director of advanced development at MAYA Design about the Information Commons and how it is progressing. According to Knauer, Maya (which stands for Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) is using P2P technology --in the sense of information sharing and not file sharing-- to link together repositories of public and private datasets in Maya’s information space. These data and data relationships are stored in universal data containers called "u-forms," which are then coded with a UUID, or universally unique identifiers. These are the basic building blocks of the company's Visage Information Architecture (VIA), which allows data repositories to effortlessly link or fuse together to achieve "liquidity" (the paper has more details)....When hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast recently, the system made its first bridging to the Information Commons as military officials needed to incorporate publicity available EPA data on toxic hazards in affected communities, said Knauer.
Update. If you had the same trouble I did downloading the report, then try this link. Thanks to several readers for the tip.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/28/2005 10:04:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
