You may already be sensing some of the effortless enthusiasm that distinguishes this proposal: We can solve "the huge problems now confronting us"; and we do not need to wrestle with "the 1%" or the politicians; the key to solutions is in our hands—in the hands of publicly sponsored intellectuals! The people out there look up to us to tell them what information needs to be like; and we also have education in our control.
Information ideogram
The Information ideogram is an “i” (for "information"), composed as a circle or a point on top of a rectangle; and inscribed in a triangle representing the metaphorical mountain. The rectangle stands for a myriad of documents; and for looking at a theme from all sides; the circle stands for the point of it all; while the triangle or the mountain symbolizes a different way to conceive and structure information; and the resulting different way to see the world. Albert Einstein warned in an interview to The New York Times, in the aftermath of Hiroshima: “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels. The Information ideogram points to (the quest for) the requisite "new type of thinking" and the information that will make it possible.
<h3>The Information ideogram explains what knowledge federation means as an activity.</h3>
Which is to complement document broadcasting by structuring and abstraction; which you'll comprehend easily if you imagine us in "information jungle"; and think of knowledge federation as a collective walk up the metaphorical mountain—so that we may see where the roads are leading to; and which one we need to follow.
The Information ideogram points to three kinds of abstraction:
- The horizontal abstraction is represented by the rectangle; you may understand it if you think of projective geometry—as depicting a complex object in terms of a collection of suitably chosen projection planes; each of which presents a simple image; so that together they show us the object from all sides.
- The vertical abstraction is represented by the point; you'll comprehend it if you think of going up a mountain and to the mountain top—from where the picture of the whole terrain is visible.
- The structural abstraction is represented by the mountain; you'll understand it if you think of the mountain as consisting of viewpoints; and of inspecting a hand-held object to see if it's broken or whole — by choosing several distinct ways to look.
<h3>The Information ideogram shows how to respond to the creative challenge the Modernity ideogram points to.</h3>
Ole-Johan Dahl and C.A.R. Hoare wrote in Structured Programming in 1972, in a chapter called “Hierarchical Program Structures”:
“As the result of the large capacity of computing instruments, we have to deal with computing processes of such complexity that they can hardly be understood in terms of basic general purpose concepts. The limit is set by the nature of our intellect: precise thinking is possible only in terms of a small number of elements at a time. The only efficient way to deal with complicated systems is in a hierarchical fashion. The dynamic system is constructed and understood in terms of high level concepts, which are in turn constructed and understood in terms of lower level concepts, and so forth.”
In Chapter Two of the Liberation book I introduce this new accountability through the analogy with computer programming: When in the early days of computing ambitious software projects resulted in chaos—composed of thousands of tangled up lines of code, which nobody could comprehend or correct—the solution was found in the creation of "software design methodologies"; whose creators considered themselves accountable for the (conceptual and technical) tools they gave to programmers.
<h3>We academic people too must become accountable.</h3>
For the (conceptual and technical) information tools we give to researchers and to society; because it is those tools that now determine whether information will result in chaos—or in a new order.
<h3>The Information ideogram shows how information needs to be structured.</h3>
By depicting the information holon; which is designed to serve as a document template; as a new basic unit or "piece" of information. A holon is both a whole in itself and a piece in a larger whole. When a myriad of documents are federated to produce the point—this point can be used to compose a higher-order holon; so that holons can be combined into a holarchy—which is what the mountain stands for.
Last not least—be sure not to miss the main point of this ideogram: Without the point, all the rest (thousands of pages of academic books and articles) is point-less!