AskemosScope

Dear reader, I'd love to bring some order here. But time is rare to work on this part. Please bear with me.

Aim on Eternal Software

The aim of Askemos is the system independant integration of information technology infrastructure across areas of accountability. In the essay Software That Lasts 200 Years summarises Dan Bricklin motivations and design requirements of Askemos. (Even though he did not know.) See also the POPLmark Challenge.

Usage examples

Askemos (as it's commercial counterpart fiXml) fit a wide range of applications , e.g.,;

• general workflow and information systems
• trouble- ticket and order handling applications
• points of delivery for immaterial goods including payment (e.g. tipping would be simple)
• accounting, reliablearchives and document management Three examples shall outline range of possibilities:

example use: virtual office

Four small or medium-sized enterprises, departments of larger enterprises or simillar win a virtual office in the internet: For that purpose the aggree by contract to operate an Askemos network. Each of them has a permanent internet connection (cheap flat rate) and permanently runs a server. Whilst those severs are only available to say 90% (quite feasable) the virtual office is fully available 99% of the time. The restricted, that is read only mode, of operation is even there in 99.99% of the time. It's planed to create a bootable media to run such a server.

example use: distributed community coordination

http://www.investregionx.de is a project to coordinate rural development projects. The commercialy licensed variant "fiXml" of Askemos is used to provide the community with online tools for project coordination and communication. Here it is escpecially important, that users can freely manage access rights to documentation available to subgroups and keep each other up to date.

example use: eGovernment

Scaling up, governmental administration could operate large scale installations to announce and keep public data. Each citizen could have a personal account for information and register purpose.

The actual advantage over a central solution here is security. Abuse, while possible as long as humans have access, is limitted because there's only limitted power on each account. No central administrative power can be abused.

Design guiding Material

The article http://www.teleport.com/~sphere/documents/0006/6/index.html has a focus on what programs are. Askemos does not care so much about programs as such, but with programs being some abstract modell and nothing more than an idea, we can generalize those arguments to help to describe properties of objects in the InformationSpace as handled by Askemos. I found this article related, whether or not I'll find the time to look close -- I don't know.

In http://www.law.berkeley.edu/journals/btlj/articles/12_1/Stefik/html/reader.html we can read about the concept of trusted systems. The studies made when designing Askemos directed to the insight that we have to distinguish between the information itself and data, which encodes it. Copyright certainly applies to the data (information can't be copied), while trusted systems have to deal with licensing conditions of information. Quite a difference and relief for the scope of trusted systems, which have no need to understand the sheer concept copying at all..

KnowledgeWorker, KognitiveTechniken,
KommunikationsInfrastruktur, P2P, SoftwareRot, an
essay with some pointers to look behind.  

The InformationSpace is a virtual object by itself. You can percieve it in your head or observe it's effects. You can't "have" it, but you can be part of it. For a library in the InformationSpace it's important not only to imagine it. You want to observe it. That's what the software "Askemos" (AskemosServer) is good for.

Trust and Trade - Ownership and Transfer Rules

PrivatSphaere:information leaks about private data and ways to protect by legal and technical means. Side note: This protection is called anonymity (I learned from my professor). In contrast to what I believed before (and many don't make this rather nonobvious distinction) anonymity does not mean to hide your name from some information you made public. It means to make it impossible to associate you name with a particular information in any way. Though it incorporates all snoofing protection.

IntellectualProperty

The British Library has issued an IP manifesto (with regard to DRM):

• Existing limitations and exceptions to copyright law should be extended to encompass unambiguously the digital environment;
• Licenses providing access to digital material should not undermine longstanding limitations and exceptions such as "fair dealing";
• The right to copy material for preservation purposes "a core duty of all national libraries" should be extended to all copyrightable works;
• The copyright term for sound recordings should not be extended without empirical evidence of the benefits and due consideration of the needs of society as a whole;
• The us model for dealing with "orphan works" should be considered for the uk;
• The length of copyright term for unpublished works should be brought into line with other terms (ie: life plus 70 years).

In other words, copyright law should not change in the digital environment

JFWLicensingNotes

Conclusion

Askemos shall reflect concepts which concern: self preservation (askemos archives itself) and the basic mechanism of understanding, communication and trust (and how to tell the mechanism apart from policy). These mechanism are the basic principles, or common code, of viable (sustaining) communities, societies etc. as expressed in their language, rules and laws. As such it's only loosely connected to software. (To put it different, no sane rule or law contradicts this text. If any did that's a problem/bug of either the rule or this work.)

The Askemos infrastructure must caters to the needs in the computer age as ink, paper and Gutenberg for the last few hundred years.