The Phaneron

I think there’s a very important connection between LOD and President Obama’s Transparency and Open Government Directive (TOGD). Bear with me while I explain. First, the Internet design principles share a common set of values with TOGD. See Tim Berner’s Lee’s The World Wide Web and the Web of Life. Second, LOD is the only way to achieve the three goals in the TOGD – transparency, participation and collaboration – at Internet scale. Why Internet scale? Because only the Internet provides a broad enough reach to permeate today’s society.

Cookbooks are a tradition in software and mashups are all the rage today, so I couldn’t resist starting a mashup cookbook. But, before I show some of my recipes and what I have in the oven, I thought I’d explain the role mashups and social production play in solving a problem too hard and too expensive to solve under conditions controlled by corporations or the government. An issue we face today is producing a sufficiently complex mirrror world to match the needs of an information society.