As was mentioned in yesterday’s post on CLOUD’s Dimensions, Who, What, When and Where look different in a world of ME 1.0, as opposed to a world of Web 2.0.  This post looks specifically at one of these four axes, WHERE I Am™, and provides more detail on CLOUD’s thinking on this particular dimension.  To frame our discussions on dimensions, the diagram to the left will become more prevalent in CLOUD’s public facing conversations about its work.  In this case, WHERE I Am is shaded to indicate that for the purposes of this conversation, WHERE is a fixed vector or axis.

As one unpacks the idea of WHERE I Am, there are actually several components acting in concert.  There is, of course, my physical presence, but there is also the dimension of geography. WHERE I Am is actually a combination of two places:  mine and the geographic location I happen to be occupying at any given moment.  With or without ME, the geographic location still exists.  In addition to this physical topology, humanity has also created a globe-spanning built environment of schools, bank, homes and many other structures.

So, when Places asks me to “check in,” it is actually triangulating three components: geography, structures and ME.  In all three cases, this “data” does not belong to Google, Facebook or any other web site.  Just because Google takes a picture of something from the Street doesn’t change the ownership of the structure.  Just because Facebook has uploaded all sorts of business addresses into its databases doesn’t mean the locations magically appeared or that I must manage my location from their website.  WHERE, like WHO, belongs to ME.  So, if the locations are already there, then trying to figure out whether Foursquare, Gowalla or Facebook is the best path to manage my geolocation services seems to be the wrong question.  Regardless of which of these sites I choose to use as my viewer, whatever choices I make about my geolocation should be available across websites.  That is the heart of ME 1.0, as opposed to Web 2.0.  If I start with ME, then the walls of the Web come tumbling down.

As a future posting on another of the CLOUD axes will discuss, WHERE I Am can also be WHO I Am.  For example, let’s suppose Google’s Street View is showing us a school.  Obviously, part of this geographic location relates to the structure, but the school’s “tag cloud” isn’t limited to just where it is.  The school is a sort of “flowpoint.”  It is not just a geographic tag but actually a “nexus” of numerous “threads” flowing through it.  At the same time that students and teachers enter the building, there is another “flow” of data occurring, one related to learning rather than location.  The concept of WHO will be discussed in more detail in an upcoming WHO I Am™ CLOUD Dimensions posting.  The concept is also discussed in the video vignette on our home page, CLOUD and the Power of WHO.

Getting back to WHERE I Am, though, there is one more facet of this concept worth considering.  The physical world and the virtual world are simply not the same.  As discussed in my personal blog, The End of Linearity, there is no “there” on the Internet. Web destinations are not the same as a street address.  A URL is merely a pointer; latitude and longitude are real.  URLs can move and change; locations don’t.  And, in the world of the Internet, I can be everywhere, anywhere and nowhere, all at the same time.  And no matter WHERE I Am, CLOUD’s language will make it about you and the local ownership and use of your data, of which where is but one more axis that makes you, you.

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We’ll also be making several posts over the course of the next few days to discuss Who, What, When and Where and how they look different in a world of ME 1.0, as opposed to a world of Web 2.0.  Who, What, When and Where are not unique.  These four axes are discussed by companies from Apple to Facebook as the core for some of their new products and services.  WHO I Am™, WHAT I Am™, WHEN I Am™ and WHERE I Am™ are unique, and they form the four axes of the future multi-dimensional standard CLOUD is building.  The following picture will help us frame this discussion over the next several posts as we discuss each dimension from a CLOUD point of view:

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During our lunch, Charlie had an interesting reaction to CLOUD, describing it as the “logical model for the semantic web.”  That lunch conversation, plus my reading of his and Liv Watson’s excellent book, “XBRL for Dummies,” have sparked some interesting thoughts about ways in which CLOUD and XBRL might interact in practical ways.

With all the discussion over transparency, open government and “government” data, it seemed like an interesting example could be culled from current places in which XBRL is already being used: public filings.  Of course, the very fact that a verb like “filed” is used to describe the process tells me that even without CLOUD, XBRL is not meeting its full potential.  If I understand the process for SEC filings in XBRL correctly, a public company still “sends” or “files” their XBRL Instance to the SEC, so as to meet their filing requirements.  In the world of the Internet, this makes no sense to me at all.  If we had to “send” HTML documents around the Internet, the Web would never have taken off!

That being said, I will move on…  The example that follows will highlight how XBRL-wrapped data, further empowered by a contextual set of CLOUD tags, could create a more dynamic and secure process.  Before doing that, though, it is useful to think about ways in which we already interact with government and “tag” those relationships.  [To better understand these concepts, it would be useful to watch CLOUD and the Power of WHO and Connecting WHO and WHAT in the CLOUD at our homepage or on our channel "ANewCLOUD" at YouTube.]

Current “Tagging” By Government

As citizens and businesses, we already have “tagged” information, provided by our government.  Our drivers license or social security card is a government “tag.”   Of course, these particular tags are physically delivered, so we all accumulate a lot of different cards to manage our physical tag infrastructure with the government. Beyond our drivers license or social security card, there are passports, military ids and a whole myriad of other bits of plastic or paper we must carry around.  In most cases, to receive one of these various tags, we must fill out duplicate information on multiple forms to resubmit data that is already maintained in numerous databases, scattered across government silos and agencies.  You get the idea.

Reconceiving the Relationship Between People and Data

Everyone wants to open the government data stores, and that is certainly one step to transparency, but the mess of data behind the store windows may only complicate transparency, not improve it.  The reality is that we must focus on people, and not just the data.  Our data-centric approach drives this deeper architectural problem.  By starting with data and then associating individuals with that data, it is simply impossible for this problem to go away or best case, incredibly hard to fix with current approaches.

However, starting with people and associating their data with them, changes the whole construct of the problem.  For example, my birthday (a data point) doesn’t change, but it is replicated in multiple data silos, from my insurance provider to my doctor’s office to my bank account and to all of the government “tags” I’ve already enumerated.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  As Paul and I discussed in our article Set the Default to Open published in Volume 14, Issue 1 of the Texas Review of Law and Politics, we need to move beyond eGovernment to meGovernment.  As we explored in Section 8 of that piece, meGovernment has implications for both delivery of government services and regulation.

XBRL SEC Filings in a CLOUD-enabled World

The Set the Default to Open article explores a number of examples of meGovernment in healthcare and education settings.  I will focus here on the filing of XBRL reports by public companies with the SEC.

If you think about the discrete, as well as aggregated data, that makes up a filing, the only difference amongst the data is who has “rights” to it.  Currently, we package the data in different worksheets or databases to handle these access issues.  Rather than recreating the data in multiple silos to handle the issue of visibility, a CLOUD-enabled Internet looks at the problem differently.  With a language for people, the cross-tags to the data would handle how this information is seen by different people.  In the CLOUD world, XBRL would be considered a type of WHAT tag.  Each of the discrete bits of company data could be “wrapped” in not only XBRL but also “wrapped” by WHO tags.

So, an analyst at Company X, may only have rights to see and validate certain discrete data, while a controller or CFO at the same company, would have rights to not only see a wider array of discrete data but also see that data aggregated.  When the SEC looked at the data, they would want to know which data at Company X had been cross-tagged with the CFO and CEO’s WHO tags, so as to ensure that the data met the necessary filing requirements.  Rather than sending an instance, the XBRL data could simply stay on company servers, while being protected by the new rights structure envisioned by CLOUD and the many intersections between WHO and WHAT.

Taking this example another step, it would also be possible for company shareholders to view this corporate information differently than those that don’t own shares.  There is another WHAT tag, known as the CUSIP, that would enable this variation in visibility.  CUSIP is the 9-character alphanumeric code that identifies any North American security for the purposes of facilitating clearing and settlement of trades.  Everyone that owns a share of a company could connect their WHO profile to this WHAT tag, thus giving them a different “window” into the XBRL-wrapped data from companies that they own shares in.

Within the new fabric of the Internet enabled by CLOUD, the relationships between WHAT tags are also woven together, connecting the appropriate XBRL-wrapped data to the necessary CUSIP WHAT tags.  CLOUD has modeled a use case and rudimentary screenshots for this idea with SWIFT around their corporate actions project with XBRL and DTCC.

Now that we have walked through the intricacies of linking WHO and WHAT and WHAT and WHAT, the last link in the puzzle is to understand how WHO and WHO connect.  (WHO profiles can exist not just for individuals but for entities as well, like a company, government, school or agency.)  Employees at a company could tag their individual WHO profiles to Company X and thus be cross-tagged with Company X’s institutional WHO profile.  That cross-tag would confer certain added and unique rights to their individual profiles.

The SEC would also have its institutional WHO profile, which could be cross-tagged to its agency employees.  The resulting intersection of these WHOs and WHATs would determine what information would be made visible where.  One set of data could be visible to one SEC employee but not another.

Evolution of Tagging by Government

So, by making data “smart,” it is possible for information to be transformed and made accessible in unique and different ways, without having to ship it around the Internet as if the Internet were nothing more than a 21st century courier service.  The same data in a CLOUD-enabled world can be “viewed” by analyst, CFO, shareholder and securities alike without scattering the same data in multiple databases.  However, those “views” are unique and built around the individual.

This example should not only highlight how CLOUD and XBRL might interact in the case of public filings with the SEC but spark some ideas on how our government tagging could move into the 21st Century as well.  I simply don’t need another card to carry in my digital wallet.

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In a weird twist of political philosophy on privacy and liberty, I agree and disagree with them both.  However, I disagree not because Nicholas and Jim are wrong, but because I do not believe that we must accept the assumptions behind their arguments.  Their assumptions with respect to online privacy are rooted in the idea that the World Wide Web is a static state of affairs, that privacy can only be managed through settings at various websites.  As CLOUD has written and tweeted extensively over the past year, the World Wide Web is but one “view” into the Internet.  True privacy and security of the sort that tackles Facebook’s continued bouts with privacy problems and the challenges with patient data from EHRs will depend on a new language for the Internet, one built around people and not web pages.

One sentence in particular from Mr. Carr’s article jumped out at me.  ”Most of us view personalization and privacy as desirable things, and we understand that enjoying more of one means giving up some of the other.”  Based on the current paradigm of the web, that is true, but what if privacy were architected into the Internet?  Current mechanisms for “logging into” web sites or submitting data force this sort of false trade-off.  CLOUD believes that transparency and privacy can co-exist, but it requires a new perspective.  That perspective is ME 1.0, rather than just Web 2.0.  Quoting from Mr. Carr again, “This tradeoff has always been part of our lives as consumers and citizens. But now, thanks to the Net, we’re losing our ability to understand and control those tradeoffs.”  CLOUD’s goal through it contextual markup language (CTML) is make those tradeoffs clear and put control back in the hands of individuals.

The idea of ME 1.0 is described on our homepage.  This concept and the idea of separating WHO I Am and WHAT I Am are at the foundation of a new Internet.  The language that CLOUD is building is why I can agree and disagree with both Nicholas and Jim.  I agree with Nicholas that as individuals we must secure our privacy to secure our liberties, and I agree with Jim that we should “get smart and learn how to control personal information.”  CLOUD believes, however, that that control should be in our hands and not just at the mercy of others on the Web, be they Facebook, Google, your doctor or the government.

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Following the Health 2.0 Conference on April 6 and 7 and meetings with the innovation leadership at SWIFT on April 8 in Brussels, my wife and I enjoyed some time with her family in Belgium before returning home.  It was during this time with family that an interesting conversation unfolded over a delicious lunch in the countryside west of Brussels that unexpectedly yielded some intriguing historical insights into language and access.

My wife’s aunt lives in a beautiful old farmhouse that has been renovated several times over its life.  One of those renovations is a truly special library (populated with many, many antique books by her now deceased uncle and former justice on the Belgian Court of Appeals).

It was during lunch in the salon close to this library that one of my wife’s other uncles told the story of another old collection of books in the city of Lille, which is now in France (Lille is only an hour or so from Brussels and used to be a part of Belgium.  Like the Alsace-Lorraine with Germany and France, it is one of the places that has gone back and forth in history.).  As my uncle told his story from Lille, I realized that in many ways it is the same challenge we have with languages on the Internet.

What struck me from his story was when he said the following, “many people in Belgium and France can not read the histories of the region because they are in Flemish and not French.”  Think about that statement for a moment.

Without translations, there are stories that are completely missed by entire populations, because they are in a language that others do not use.  In modern terms, this is akin to Google’s scanning of books into digital form. That undertaking is only a small portion of the ultimate benefit of the project.  Google needs to translate them, too. Because, if they are in a language that no one understands or no one uses, then it is as if they were never printed in the first place.

The history of books can inform us in the debate over ABS transparency, and my uncle, who has no knowledge of technology at all, may have hit the nail on the head with his story of the Flemish books in Lille.  If the disclosures are in a language no one uses, then it is as if the information was never disclosed in the first place.

Of course, language is only one piece of the equation.  Even before books and printing, language flourished, although it wasn’t widely disseminated because the cost of distribution (i.e. scribes) was very high. The invention of the printing press didn’t change language, but it did change the speed, volume and dissemination of information. More people could read because we suddenly lowered the cost of books through the use of technology. The printing press was a major achievement because it removed the human capital limitation of scribes on the amount of information available.

So, language and printing are both vital to the dissemination and access to information.  The SEC must, therefore, not only pick the right language but pick the right process to ensure that information is democratized and markets function.

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Although Google Buzz has fixed its highly visible privacy flaw that occurred at launch, this episode is another indication that privacy must be woven into the fabric of the Internet, rather than a term of service by vendors.  The challenge ahead of us is not just a technological one but a philosophical one.  At its heart, the question is “who owns ME?”  CLOUD’s goal is to build the technology architecture that makes it possible for us to have “Local Ownership and Use of Data.”

Peter at SWIFT does a brilliant job of explaining how and why this is different than the eID movement and how CLOUD can propel all of these efforts forward by ushering in a new era of ME 1.0.

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Cerf urges standards for cloud computing

In this recent Infoworld article, Vint Cerf, as always, asks the right question. The answer to his question is to return to the basics of the Internet that he created. The “inter-cloud” problem he described most recently at the Churchill Club stems from popular acceptance of HTML 15 years ago. While HTML sparked an Internet boom, it made people look at the Internet as a way to connect Web pages, not people.

Securing user data scattered among large numbers of Web silos is complex and consumes huge amounts of every users’ most valuable resource: time. The solution isn’t another identity standard or method for data portability. It’s a paradigm shift.

CLOUD’s technology standard is that shift. It transcends mere identity to empower Internet users to control precisely how their information is used. Think of it as a privacy and authenticity standard that can work in more ways than HTML for the simple reason that it marks up facts about people, not text. The standard would permit anyone — user or service provider — to develop tools that are simultaneously more sophisticated and easier to use.

Success requires a shift in thinking, a step beyond HTML. A mark-up language for people instead of text — one that supports Internet connections that transcend the browser paradigm that’s consumed us since the 90s — would be a return to the very roots of the Internet created by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.

CLOUD believes the keys to adoption are, one, Local Ownership and Use of Data — hence our name. Two: Breaking down health, finance, education, and other silos to simply connect people, not industries. Just as people use one main standard to connect text on the Internet, we should use one standard to connect with each other on the Internet. And three: Empowering people to easily separate their identity from their data at the transaction and relationship levels. Thus, privacy is ensured and the economic value of connections among people and their data grows. ME 1.0, not just Web 2.0.

From the perspective of a rain drop, there is no such thing as a cloud.  By changing perspective, we’ll achieve an “inter-cloud standard.” Starting with the individual, not the cloud, is the first step.

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Protecting privacy isn’t a challenge unique to Facebook. It was around long before the invention of HTML and Web sites 15 years ago, but those developments made the challenge acute. The pre-Web Internet was about connecting people directly, but the Web caused a reversion to publishing and broadcasting models. The Web and HTML have contributed to the growth of the Internet, but their main side effect has been to force us into silos to connect with each other. Facebook, with 350 million users, is one impressive silo, but more than 1.7 billion Internet users are spread among millions of other silos.

So, what does this mean for privacy? Today’s Web-based approaches to privacy require that my identity and facts about me — particularly “who I am” and “what I am” — share the same data silos, whether on Facebook, at Amazon, or in my local DMV’s e-renewal system. CLOUD’s take on the Express Scripts data breach expands on how privacy can be even more critical in the realm of health information than elsewhere.

CLOUD is creating standards to make privacy an architectural issue with a structure to benefit all Internet users — instead of making us dependent on the lowest common denominator of what particular Web sites happen to do with our information. By separating the “who” and “what” of identity into core components protected by a new contextual markup language, CLOUD plans to destroy our collective dependency on mass data aggregators like Facebook, not to mention schools, medical facilities, and businesses — and restore genuine privacy control to individuals.

CLOUD will continue to develop its new approach to the Internet in the new year. Please join the conversation!

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CLOUD doesn’t take positions on legislation and regulation like “net neutrality,” but it agrees about the power of technology.

The power of the Internet comes from connecting people and democratizing access to content and conversations. Unfortunately, the importance of users isn’t fully considered in pending net neutrality legislation or Federal Communications Commission regulatory proposals. Users simply aren’t seen as potential participants in the ultimate decisions of legislators or regulators.

In any event, using technology like CLOUD’s Context Markup Language (CTML) to empower individuals to find the right balance of price, speed, and capacity for themselves will ultimately make the entire net neutrality debate obsolete.

Net neutrality views of big players “are growing hazier,” Crovitz reports. He notes a Washington Post interview in which Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said, “It is possible for the government to screw the Internet up big time.”

Indeed. Mistake number one happens when policymakers confuse the Web with the Internet. They are not synonyms. The former tends to connect people with commercial services; the latter tends to connect people with people. It is the individualism of the Internet, not the collectivism of the Web, that will ultimately prevail.

While cloud computing and cloud services are all the rage, the Web paradigm, because it’s the Internet’s most visible feature to both government and business policy makers, leads to short-sighted thinking. The longer the Internet is thought to be merely the wires that deliver services, the longer government and business policy will remain half-baked. The Internet requires new tools to connect people to each other, as well as it connects people to traditional corporate and government Web sites.

Crovitz writes:

The best defense against access providers’ acting unreasonably is more competition. The alternative would treat the modern network of the Web as if it were the 19th-century network of railroads, with the FCC as a modern-day version of the Interstate Commerce Commission, which set rail rules and tariffs, slowing innovation in transportation until the agency was abolished in 1995 as a bureaucratic anachronism.

Bingo! In the first 40 years of Internet freedom and abundance, only the past 15 or so were delivered by HTML and the World Wide Web. CLOUD proposes that the next revolution of the Internet be achieved through a new language for people, not just Web pages.

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A storm brewing?
First is the familiar risk of technological lock-in, as rival companies promote their own, mutually incompatible, standards and formats, as they have done in the past.

CLOUD intends to solve that problem for information about you. What better way to avoid technological lock-in for Internet users than to create a multi-industry standard computing language that puts people back in charge of their own information? Turns out this approach addresses the Economist’s second and third concerns — privacy and security — too.

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