The Infoverse
The internet holds an immense amount of information. At any time, we are one internet search away from any information we need. Well, almost. The more complicated or specialized a research gets the more likely it will be difficult to find an answer. While it is usually easy to find information about significant events, it is often difficult to find information about how single events relate to each other. It is up to the researcher to read a lot of information and to connect the dots.
Especially news articles, while factually correct from the temporal point of view when they were written, can be misleading as they often only represent a snapshot of a much broader story. Subsequent events are often not presented with an article.
Digital journals, newspapers and encyclopedias are not very different than their printed counterparts used to be. Of course, topics are linked and articles contain richer media content. We can jump much faster from topic to topic; it is easier to do a research. However, most of the information they contain is still plain text. The containing information in each text is digital-semantically detached from any other text.
Information expressed in Havel automatically merges with any other Havel-expressed information. The total of all [Havel-] information available to a user at any given moment is called the information universe or infoverse. This can include any local data stored on the current device, all connected universal repositories in the cloud and any Havel content providers, maybe newspapers, encyclopedias, etc.
An information in such a homogeneous infoverse is, like in the real world, almost never alone. It is fundamentally connected to all related information. Entities, persons and events that have relations with each other are connected. Havel can express this information down to the smallest detail including temporal changes, precise descriptions of any relations, annotations, and much more. Changing the temporal context while analyzing information presents the information how it was in the past or might be in the future. Users can even change the interpretational viewpoint, for example having information interpreted using one particular political opinion (all of that of course only if such information have been included in the sources).
The infoverse is the next, logical step in digital information technology. It might very well be as significant as going digital was 20 years ago. When we changed from print to connected-digital, it meant instant access to information for everyone. Creating the infoverse can mean enabling everyone to also use that information.
The infoverse is a similar idea as the semantic web by the W3C. While the underlying technologies (RDF in case of semantic web and universal data in case of infoverse) are similar, they have a few technical differences, both with their advantages and disadvantages. The two technologies are not in competition and can complement each other. Havel will certainly be compatible with RDF/OWL, allowing importing/exporting data and reusing existing ontologies. This will allow resources available on the internet backed by Havel expressions to become part of the semantic web and Havel can reuse established industry standards.
This post is part of a comprehensive introduction into SRDM, graph languages and Havel.
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