Verified Information

Full Title or Meme

A collection of Verified Claims or data together with the context that can provides meaning to the provenance, meaning and accessibility of that data.

Context

While a great deal of ink has been expended (and captured on the wiki page Information) at is core information is most useful when view as input to a decision process. That decision process must be able to evaluate all of the data available, understand the reliability of the data and then act on the data. The better the information content of data, the more valuable it is. This wiki page is about creating packets of data together with the Provenance of the data, the Meaning of the data and the Authorized Access to the data. Lets look at each of those three categories:

Meaning of the Data

Information can be useful when it is collected in one enterprise that has its own taxonomy of data elements with the intent of each element, where it is collected and how it is used. The context for all three of these functions is embedded in the very structure of the enterprise policies and procedures. When the data is moved from one enterprise to another, the context is stripped away and even if it were to be available to the receiver of the data, that context might be opaque or worse in the enterprise that acquires the data. A solution to this problem arose early in the transport of goods from one country to another starting with the rise of international trade. One particular use case, the Berlin airlift brought all of the challenges of international traffic in goods to a head and forced an enterprising solution by U.S. Airforce Colonel Edward Guilbert starting with paper forms and transitioning to a standardized format for teletype machines in 1968. This effort evolved into the work of the Transportaion Data Coordinating Committee which organized ANSI Committee X12 for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Even in 1975 it was realized that the source of data needed to be validated, the meaning of the data standardized and the destination of the data discoverable.

Access to the Data

• Information (aka contextualized data) is valuable.

Problem

It goes without saying that we live in an information age. The threats to any enterprise in the current digital ecosystem might be different in means, but the motive remains the same; bad actors are out there to steal your:

1. money
2. client or customers.

Whether the bad actor is Facebook or some Bulgarian Troll, the means is universal access to the internet.

Solution

This wiki discusses one specific solution to the acquisition, interpretation and Protected storage of Data. Specifically it looks at packets of data together with the associated metadata.