In view of increasing scope for information services, infrastructural capabilities beyond what is now known as the semantic web are compelling. Metapattern delivers the flexibility, based especially on a formalism for multiple context and time, for profiting from global interconnection.

in: Notes on Metapattern, part 1

 

An orientation at semantics is critically important. It is currently sorely neglected, but is of paramount importance. It should be recognized that interconnection requires design etc. at infrastructural scale.

in: On metapattern and other themes in information management

 

[W]ith dense interconnectivity, we’re moving in the direction of a civil informational infrastructure[.]

in: note 23.15

 

[I]nfrastructure is the necessarily uniform foundation for differentiation. There is no paradox […].

in: Civil information management, a short introduction: an information discipline for society and the metaphor of traffic

 

For infrastructure, […] there is by definition no business case according to the limited profit mode. On the contrary, it is precisely because investments made independently at the smaller scale can never be shown to be profitable that an encompassing investment is made.

in: Civil information management, a short introduction: an information discipline for society and the metaphor of traffic

 

Please note that infrastructure is not confined to material resources. Especially for regulating (information) traffic, infrastructure includes the legal framework, rules, procedures, etcetera.

in: Civil information management, a short introduction: an information discipline for society and the metaphor of traffic

 

It surely is impossible already for some time now to deny that digital information technology establishes (inter)connectivity. When physical connections are consolidated into an infrastructure which is used for sign exchange, as happens for everyone to notice, the qualitatively new question of coordinating information variety arises. In fact, infrastructure must be augmented to include semantic order, that is, even what infrastructure involves now changes accordingly.

in: Metapattern of natural complexes: enlisting Justus Buchler's metaphysics for informational infrastructure

 

Information society, or network society as it is also called, requires an infrastructure facilitating citizens’ large and structurally ever changing (!) variety of informational interactions (sign exchanges).

in: Verkeersbegrip van algemeen belang: geschiedenis van infrastructurele stelselmatigheid voor toekomst van informatieverkeer

 

So, yes, [we may] recognize strains of relevant ideas all over philosophical writings. But those ideas are always far removed from supplying specifications in an engineering sense. For example, […] how do we develop and maintain a single infrastructure (now read: the Internet etc.) for all language games? I made up Metapattern precisely for answering this infrastructural need.

in: Notes on Metapattern and enneadic semiosis, part 2

 

It simply means we need cross-cutting facilities, call it infrastructure, too, for exchanging expressions for our inherently pluriform concerns. At the scale of diversity, therefore, semantics is in fact at the very heart of infrastructure. And it needs to be supported by qualitatively congruent measures for technical and organizational interoperability. It's precisely this problem/opportunity, i.e. starting from semantics, that I'm addressing with Metapattern as a method for conceptual information modeling regardless of scale.

in: note 47.4

 

Don’t we live in a democracy? After all, civilization depends on variety, diversity, et cetera. Doesn’t that make it even obvious that government’s first and foremost task is infrastructural management, i.e. facilitating and promoting varied exchanges between citizens? How else can government serve a viable society except (sic!) from an organicistic vision of contextualism?

in: Invitation to contextualism

 

1. [W]hat fundamental obstacle is apparently keeping us from developing the integrated information management that we so sorely need to be able to offer and 2. how […] can [we], and therefore should, start here and now with a different approach to conceptual modeling to overcome it[?]

in: note 53.7

 

In Dutch, and in German, for that … matter, the traditional term for, say, people being actively engaged in their community is: verkeer (German: Verkehr). Subsequently using bicycles, cars, airplanes, or whatever for going about our ways is also called ‘verkeer,’ but is understood as being-a-part-of the far more general concept of — well, why shouldn’t I try an English neologism? — communiting.
Digital technologies offer modalities of communiting. What we do with them differs from moving ourselves and/or material goods about. Instead, we ourselves can stay put, while information goes about (with data inevitably being a material good, too, which here I’ll conveniently ignore :-). In principle, though, it is nothing new. People since time immemorial have used smoke signals, sent letters, et cetera. As it is, we now conduct our lives occupying ourselves increasingly with information communiting (Dutch: informatieverkeer) as an aspect of communiting (pleonasm, but perhaps helping to make the point: social communiting). However, what have been conceived as separate applications are simply not sufficiently prepared for seamless — support of — participation in information communiting. Let’s say that nobody ever dreamt of the communication potential of digital technologies. So-called professionals, however, are still putting processing first, making an afterthought at best of interconnection. For some time now, that is the wrong way around (as “integration problems” are trying to ‘tell’ us).
It is because of such “integration problems” that stand-alone systems are classified as legacy. For all sorts of reasons, I would say the most important being of a psychological nature, those applications cannot be changed, replaced and so on overnight. My idea of an information roundabout is to start with ‘information traffic.’ From its principle it is non-invasive regarding the applications — rather, their respective database instances — being thus interconnected. The maxim reads: Don’t change anything! I find it goes down well when qualifying a … change proposal. In practice there is no paradox experienced. For what stakeholders take away from it, is that their stakes are being respected, served and so on. So, each user can continue to use her/his particular application just as s/he is … used to. What really does change, is that through the information roundabout each user is helped with suggestions for improving the quality of information in her/his application. […] They soon recognize […] their own advantage. No more problems which are in fact impossible to solve in isolation as all too often occurs when, for example, an external actor unwittingly, but often unnecessarily and thereby confusing coordination, provides different information to different applications. Of course, what most importantly d[oes] change [i]s trust. Local users c[o]me to rely on the information roundabout for the quality of their work, acknowledging mutual influences operating on what they now recognized as the larger scale of real … communiting. So, also very soon, thus being freed from frustrating work, they [a]re even happy to let the information critical for coordination be managed from the ‘site’ of information roundabout.

in: note 71.8