Comments on: Data Relating to People

By: Edward Barrow

Edward Barrow — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:38:13 +0000

I think the key word is “about”: this is data about people.

Consider this as an association, coupling the data item (name, phone-number, colour-preference) to the individual.

There exists, for any individual, a large number of these links or associations. Some are valid, correct, and useful; others are just wrong. Some are public, and some are private.

Now, suppose we put a web-of-trust PKI over this, so that it becomes possible for anyone digitally to sign such an association, including (of course) the data subject.

Then the associations become more useful - rather than being of the form “Person A (is/has) Attribute X”, they take the form “Person T says that Person A (is/has) Attribute X”.

The worth of any such statement depends on the trust we place in person (or institution) T’s authority to decide on Attribute X in relation to person A. For many, but not all, attributes, the most trustworthy source is Person A. Thus I am likely to value “Person A says that Person A’s phone number is P” more than “Person Y says that ….” - unless Person Y happens to be the phone company.

Digital signatures (by authors of their articles and amendments), in association with the history functions could also make wikis trustworthy.

By: allankz

allankz — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 04:36:33 +0000

Data can be considered as anything you know about the anything that is either it is living thing or a nonliving thing, any kind of information treated as data. So you can easily say that existence of life is all depend on data. The data is related to people as their life related with breathing.
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allankz

http://www.widecircles.info

By: Guillermo

Guillermo — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:31:11 +0000

There’s a kind of data that it’s near the 4th of your data, but still different. The data created by a individual but modified by himself or by others, like in a wiki. There’s a time when it’s maybe impossible to know the «real» author of that data.

I Hope you can be able to understand my English

By: mawrya

mawrya — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:15:21 +0000

Your four categories: Personal, Intentional, Harvested and Relationship seem to go back and forth between identifying data by how its created: Harvesting and Intentionally versus what the data *is* - Personal metrics and Relationship information, for example. I find it easier to wrap my mind around the topic when a single, defined naming convention is followed. For example, Harvesting is a creation method but the name you would give to the class of data might be “Behavioral” were you to name it based on what that data really represents, what it *is* - most web sites collect data on visitors to track their behavior.

Of course it all depends on what you indent to do. Methods of data creation can be just important as the data content itself. But I think the distinction needs to be clear.

By: lrbabe

lrbabe — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:17:42 +0000

Intentional content may be more than just blog posts, photos, things like that, what about “knowledges” ? Data shared for the public good, such as encyclopedic articles, video tutorials (screencasts), slideshows (see those from J.Resig hosted on slideshare)