Posted 10:12 AM

Is "fact" analog or digital?

In a recent posting about Kim Cameron's latest effort ("Proposal for a Common Identity Framework"), Radovan Semancik picks a number of nits, including this:

"It also seems to assume a binary view of trust: something is either "in doubt" (in claims) or becomes a "fact". I consider this binary view to be one of the worst fallacies of most current identity architectures and systems."

Now it could be that he means there's actually 3 possibilities: "in doubt", "fact" or "false." But, somehow, I get the sense that he refers to some analog function of factuality which I simply cannot fathom. He later adds: "No information is absolutely reliable and all the information (at least in cyberspace) is subjective," which appears to be positively Luddite in finding cyberspace to be somehow less reliable than, say, print media.

In any event, Cameron's latest effort, the 30-page (sometimes dense reading) paper written in conjunction with Dr. Kai Rannenberg (who holds the T-Mobile Chair for Mobile Business and Multilateral Security at Goethe University Frankfurt) and Dr. Reinhard Posch (Federal CIO for the Austrian government) deserves your attention. Read it this weekend.

Labels: metasystem