Knowledge Banking Infrastructure

First email to Tim Berners-Lee about works, that led to what is now closely affiliated to ‘solid’, which kinda started off as RWW back in 2011, but didn’t (still doesn’t) incorporate the same methodology as my own..

As noted by other articles, the works on what was first called an ‘iBank’ have been undertaken since 2000. In no way has this been a simple or easy process.

What is Knowledge Banking Infrastructure?

The concept of a knowledge-bank; is about the manifest requirements needed for legal actors: BOTH, natural and legal personalities, to support the informatics & trust requirements, as is considered more broadly in my Human Centric Web related works whilst the seminal article explaining the history and objective purpose; is my article on The Semantic Inforg & The “Human Centric Web” — Reality Check, Tech.

The Term ‘Bank’ is often a protected word under law; and has a specified meaning, which in-turn relates to specified, operational rules.

Traditional ‘banks’ are built upon the premise that they provide financial services, including those relating to cash deposits and withdrawals.

Banks can often also provide ‘safety deposit boxes’ which are similar yet different; to the concept of an inforg, and the regulatory requirements that would need to be brought about, as to make them safe.

Therein; there are two somewhat new, influencing factors,

• Telecommunications Companies; provide services integral to law and connectivity.
• NeoBanks: are emerging, and now influences what and how banks can be brought to market.

The traditional banking sector has started to make investments into corporate ‘data sharing’ enterprises like Data Republic, that is somewhat incompatible with the ideals considered by my knowledge banking concept.

The motivation of seeking to forge a ‘knowledge banking’ industry, is to support the private use and curation of personal informatics in relation to the use of online services.

A knowledge Bank is thought of as a means to support the legal requirements; alongside practical means to provide a safe and secure place, that is intended to be supported by institutional capabilities; for highly sensitive and important private & personal datasets, alongside related informatics services.

Therein; the reality of how this ‘thing’ is designed to work,

makes it difficult to discern any particular element of the overall structured data powered informatics environment, that could otherwise be considered the ‘most sensitive’, as the operation of it, leads to a situation where its all made use of, semantically, through the lens of a dynamic software agent (AI).

The considerations includes; informatics resources such as,

• Biometric signature data
• medical information
• legal information; credentials, etc.
• relational information relating the account holder to all other agents / things.
• economic data; such as ‘digital receipts’ and the informatics means to make use of them; for healthcare, and other purposes.
• Security related informatics resources; for law enforcement agencies, etc.
• All such other knowledge assets, as informatics resources, described.

and many others, that are yet to be described, thought of or invented.

Why a Knowledge Banking Industry and not a Government service?

In Countries such as Australia, we have a system of government that is built upon principles that include the concept of separation of powers.

Source: Parliamentary Education Office, Australia

Source: Artificial Intelligence, Thinking Machines and the Future of Humanity (Gerd Leonhard)

The consideration that these knowledge banking works support, relates to whether and how the information that is collected about us, should serve us in life.

Therein, there are an array of design principles built into this ecosystem approach that incorporates the consideration that Government should be best equipped to support a regulatory frameworks to support the creation and operation of a safe and secure knowledge banking industry.

Government has an array of important roles, that must in-turn be supported, as to make any such concept able to work domestically.

With this in-mind; the knowledge banking sector makes most sense for jurisdictional environments where the independent support for the role of citizens is required as a consequence of not all people being employed by government.

The means through which, separation of powers is maintained; for cyber-physical social systems,

would best be achieved, through the creation of an industry, rather than this functional capability being provided exclusively by a sovereign government.

Apart from anything else, this helps maintain good hygiene for societal systems.

Part of the intended functional purpose, in seeking to provide an alternative model / modal framework; is to consider socio-economic and legal considerations, such as,

• Domestic ‘choice of law clauses’ and private semantic inferencing support
• Domestic ‘access to justice’ improvements,

Therein; lowering the cost for supporting for local law enforcement related ‘data requests’ provided by way of an institutional party; who is bound by regulatory frameworks, to preserve the interests of their customers (and their services)

For the vast majority of other use-cases; knowledge banks provide the means to support pseudo-anonymity, for example — URIs not easily linkable to the person, without express consent, which is particularly important an array of use-cases including those that have been described in the media analytics article.

Self hosted alternatives often relate to the use of a domain name, which in-turn makes support for many legal & pseudo-anonymity aspects, redundant.

A knowledge banking industry would also require agreed terms that support the means to provide the ability for people to move from one provider to another. This is in similar industries called ‘churning’ or ‘porting’.

Much like taking other identifiers with you to another service provider, this is an instrumental functional requirement for these sorts of semantic systems.

Other counterparts of what is expected to be performed by a knowledge bank includes; providing the,

• Means to support AI Infrastructure systems, capabilities, etc.
• Means to support forensics (such as time-stamps on RDF documents, etc.)
• Means to support machine-readable & semantic electronic contracts.
• Means to support financial attribution; including micropayments support.
• Means to have sufficient infrastructure capabilities as to support security.
• Means to adapt existing laws; as to support ‘data’ as relates to ‘personhood’ and the meaningful beneficial use and support for human agency.
• The Means to foster this ‘inforg’ environment, in a manner that discourage the sale of personal information for corporate profits.

Knowledge Banking Economics

As described more below, knowledge banking services are intended to be funded through the use of ‘knowledge banking products’ which in some ways are similar to other forms of ‘financial products’; and in other ways quite different.

When a person gets a bank-account, it’s free to create the account and a banking instrument (such as a bank-card) is sent out to them freely and this business systems model is similar to that model.

The underlying method to ‘fund’ these inforgs for natural persons freely is supported through the growth and development of new informatics (ie: AI) and ‘financial products’, that in-turn generate revenue for the institution based upon the use of the ‘inforg’ environment; without any ‘data sales’ type business models necessarily being considered reasonably applicable.

It is important that a person with no money does not loose their data; nor be prayed upon for corporate profits via ‘surveillance capitalism’ or advertising.

One of the longer-term issues that have been raised by many, is the problem that traditional services attracting a monthly fee do not support long-term reliance upon the underlying data-services. The problem is, that if a ‘consumer’ does not pay their monthly fee, then they can loose all their data.

Extending this problem, is that of circumstances where someone dies, or becomes otherwise disabled, debilitated or jailed — alongside other circumstances that would prevent them from paying for the service or attending to its needs. As such, these systems are economically designed to attend to that problem in a nuanced way, that other solutions have not effectively considered or responded to.

The economic design framework is intended to survive for life; and be made useful for others after life, as is directed by a persons will.

This is not the way most innovators in this area of ‘decentralisation’ think about how it is business models might apply; as is one of many distinguishing characteristics of my ‘human centric web’, approach...

As can be exampled (upon request); the vast majority of the ‘own your own personal data’ leaders believe that the revenue stream, is in selling that data.

What does a Knowledge Bank provide from an infrastructure or economic point of view.

The reason why this is the case is due to the desire to engender support for the instrumentation and beneficial ownership of informatics relating to one own ‘digital twin’ as to support as a principle tenant of socio-economic principles,

The Material & Accessible support of Human Dignity.

The intended purpose of these solutions is to bring about a series of reality engines; therein, both the institutional and natural relations, are supported.

As the social-informatics are of a sensitive and decentralised nature, the tooling for a Knowledge Banking industry would ideally be supported through domestic root-key infrastructure, although this is yet another topic of debate.

Studies suggest, could be implemented by national post organisations (such as AusPost); where this infrastructure is not already in place. Consequentially, an elevation of traditional ‘postmaster’ rules / laws, as were developed from the advent of the postage stamp (and the pony express); these rules, that were first defined as to improve communications reliability & integrity; could be applied, to support the needs of this approach, and in-turn the ‘knowledge banks’ could obtain a domestic CA for enterprise use.

Post offices are in most towns across Australia.

For those who don’t use computers, they could go to their post-office to get paper copies of important documents that may otherwise be unavailable to them, if they lack computing skills.

Additionally, if someone gets ‘locked out’ of their environment, Post offices are amongst the locations that can identify the person physically, and issue new access credentials should they require it for some good reason.

The market of Knowledge Banks themselves; are intended to be a trusted, infrastructure processing and informatics platform depended upon by natural agents, and in-turn relied upon by other agents as a trusted economically responsible data-source, or provider.

It is the infrastructure provider that is considered ‘trustworthy’; and as such, if informatics in their systems say something happened, it is not the trustworthiness of its user that’s of most importance; but rather, that of the infrastructure providers platform whose systems are operated with integrity.

A server operated by a person, cannot easily support 3rd party ‘trust’ needs.

At some stage or place in the supply or distribution chain; an infrastructure provider is required for ‘trust purposes’ and the ‘knowledge bank’ is thought of as a clear solution provider, made able to serve those societal and economic needs.

Therein, the infrastructure services provided by a knowledge bank, are intended to store and operate a copy of all relevant ‘permissive commons’ data-sources locally; for local use.

This design consideration relates to the use of AI and how an array of data sources are required for inferencing in connection to its use with private and authority related data, as to support the needs of dynamic agents.

This dynamic agent is essentially the ‘computational engine’ that powers the ‘digital twin’; and the a principle of how the informatics services of a knowledge bank are designed, is to ensure the operationally employed definitions directing the digital twin, are defined by the physical twin; as to inform how informatics services interact with other agents.

Whilst there are some examples where law may apply requirements; those requirements would be defined in relation to the jurisdictional affiliation the physical twin exists within; rather than somewhere else by default; and, often also, without any other choice being made available.

The ‘Knowledge Banking’ infrastructure is conceptually designed to use standards, as to support portability between providers; and, cooperative growth of infrastructure powered AI services; such as to include ‘deep learning’ capabilities, alongside others.

Rationally Decentralised

The ‘platform systems’, are not solely operated by the knowledge bank ‘in the cloud’.

Much like how cloud services otherwise work today; local informatics servers & services, are also usefully deployed as to form a ‘tiered infrastructure’. Yet the authority, is the knowledge bank in the same way the issuance of an IP Address is a service provided, by an ISP.

In-order to support ‘semantic informatics’ that is ‘human centric’, an authoritative services is required and regulatory tools support privacy & dignity considerations, unto law; domestically, in a socially aware — informatics networking environment.

How does it make money?

The biggest question raised by people who aren’t interested in conversations about human dignity; is, how does this opportunity make money.

The critical question for those most focused on money… its sad, but very real.

As noted before, there are alot of seemingly similar providers in the market already; however their business systems, often hinge upon the idea that they’ll be selling the users data.

This is not my approach, as i’m not a fan of that idea at all; considering that the commodification of knowledge could easily engender intellectual poverty, where the capacities of a persons mind in the poor underclass of society, becomes irrelevant as wealth be used to dictate who is afforded trustworthy knowledge.

A commonly stated old saying goes; ‘treat them like mushrooms, feed them shit and keep them in the dark’… as is an illustration of real-world moral poverty.

So, the answer, that i’ve not been very forthright in giving in past (as i’ve not really wanted to be involved with people who care less about human rights), is that; these platform services act to provide a nuanced and ‘fit for purpose’ human identity related infrastructure solution, world-wide; Income is generated through the use of it; and its trusted ‘knowledge economy’, and financial services.

The knowledge banking services are not only for natural legal entities, but also legal personalities (companies). It is through the use of these systems, which in-turn associates to financial distributions, that fees are made payable.

The sorts of more sophisticated knowledge banking — economic products, then develops. Systems are employed to support legal entities & their societal needs in association to what it is they do & relate in life to others.

For example;

No-matter what people try to say about others work being ‘free’ (for them); reality is, that all people have socio-economic needs. A knowledge banking sector is able to articulate how one persons ‘free works’ economically benefit others.

One area of difficulty does indeed relate to the concept of ‘free work’.

Internet use can be illustrated in terms of a material cost per hour, as can the cost for a human being located somewhere in the world to have their human dignity needs, their human rights, meaningfully made available to them.

With the web, and new-found means to engender ‘web slavery’, the relationship between a persons labour in what would reasonably be considered a form of work, and their means to economically gain from it; has few real-world supports today.

This doesn’t change the physics of causality, just the economics both today, and as a consequence of how these sorts of issues are materially addressed, world-wide.

Some of those economic impacts categorically relate to the harms and circumstances of human misery; that can wound a persons capacity to be alive, stay alive; and/or participate economically; distortions in-turn occur, harming others; and their capacity, to rely upon others.

The hope is that domestic, Knowledge Banks, will engender new economic opportunities and lower risks that relate to the operation of many existing, (socio)economic activities. It is far easier to deliver by alternative (global) means.

With that real-world reality, in mind

There is, irrespective of desire or investment / production pathways, a capacity to leverage semantic technologies in a manner that by specific business systems, can be usefully employed to build a knowledge banking sector.

The way this can engender enormous economic flows, is supported by curating information that relates to work and transactions. These ‘inforgs’ in-turn provide new opportunities for an array of ‘financial’ products, which amongst other attributes; can particularly benefit ‘knowledge workers’ alongside improving means to attend to the needs of both living and legal persons. The means to discern ‘what happened, when’, become democratised.

Lowering the cost of online financial instruments.

The means to support financial instruments online, is of great importance to all societies worldwide.

When someone hands another person $5, they get $5. This doesn’t occur online.

Whether it be the means to use financial / banking identifiers to provide services from a website or in relation to a website, that seeks to provide payments that are greater than $5; or those, that seek to define and develop new business models that may employ the billions of people and trillions of things, in association to micropayments that can accumulatively deliver a wage…

The informatics systems that support transactional incomes (gainful work / wages) in-turn also relates to the knowledge of activities relating to the person who performed them and those who received derivatives. Today a problem is that our intellectual property market that is largely, dysfunctional.

Knowledge Services, as does relate to ‘work activities’ can support a workers needs by supporting evidentiary provenance; and the capacity to take a complaint of ‘web slavery’ or workers exploitation, to a court of law.

In other areas relating to small business and even social participatory activities, it’s increasingly the case that it is not just money, that matters most.

Knowledge services can also be used to provide new, innovative and much needed insurance & health related services; bringing to market new and warranted influences that can act to expose bad actors, so they are not provided support to destroy lives; and be supported by business systems that act to neglect those who have few financial means to protect their own lives.

The economics of a knowledge bank in-turn renders meaningful support for ensuring taxpayers moneys, go towards projects that deliver valued results.

Supporting the means for governments to serve citizens, whose taxpayer dollars are in-turn known to improve the capacities of its citizens with knowledge banking, accountability; rather than more simply, via silicon valley.

Means to improve economic efficiency & root-cause analysis.

Where services are failing, it’s much quicker to identify than is otherwise the case when a public enquiry or royal commission ends-up being brought about.

Where bad actors & organisations then in-turn claim — they need, more funding.

The association between ‘what a person does’ and the socioeconomic attributions made associatively attributable to them; incorporates economic flows & reputation. The means to better qualify circumstance, capacity and moreover ‘reality’. Whilst this occurs already today, its poorly designed and is in-turn cause for significant socioeconomic harm. A knowledge banking industry & proposed ‘trusted infrastructure’ seeks to address this problem.

Both via material apparatus made to work, and the means to employ law to preserve, protect and act as a source of fairness, trust and societal growth.

A vision of how society might work, if the tools to do so are funded rather than monetising otherwise addressable forms of crime and wrong doing, by bad actors poorly disaffecting others.

Are there examples of this type of idea overseas? Yes.

In the US the Atlantic published an article that in-turn spoke of an ‘information fiduciary’. In the UK, they speak of ‘data trusts’.

The distinction made is that they speak about data or information, not knowledge.

In other similar fields, they speak about ‘persons’ (People Centric Internet as distinct to ‘human centric web’) whilst law in the same region makes no distinction between companies and natural persons, who do not share the same capacities unto law or more broadly otherwise.

I’m firmly of the opinion ‘wisdom’ should be retained in a persons head.

Therein, the concept is that whilst knowledge is brought into the cyber realm (or infosphere), a human centric web would rely upon the wisdom of human-user (via their inforgs) to define how online environments interact with others and their own lives.

In-turn, the distinction between ‘data’ and ‘information’ vs. ‘knowledge’ seeks to make a distinction that captures the involvement of AI, whilst addressing broader concerns that are coupled with it via permissive commons.

In-effect, these constituent pieces of a ‘knowledge’ framework, makes use of ‘information’ distributed as data but that ‘knowledge’ helps humanity.

This conceptual series of distinctions / differentiations, have been addressed in the article about the knowledge age which is essentially - the objective goal.

Issues and Considerations

Telecommunications have traditionally been the organisational unit who have stored network information that relates to the use of its infrastructure services. In many ways data is more secure in telcos currently than banks.

Yet this situational predicament is not necessarily, very good…

I have been informed that the rationale / reason why, law enforcement agencies may take many months to act on an issue; that requires telecommunications data, is due to the difficulty of making sense of the data, and the cost to get it in the first place.

This does not provide timely access to law enforcement for safety.

A way to shift away from requiring telecommunications support in any meaningful sense; would be to use tools that divert the informatics across to the ‘knowledge banking’ sector. Whilst licensing (ie: via ACMA and similar overseas), which is conceptually similar to an earlier experience where an ‘IPTV license was obtained’; another license could be defined as to support the needs of the telecommunications sector, to support this proposed ‘knowledge banking’ sector (ie: data retention, lawful intercept, etc.)

Another opportunity might be for Telecommunications companies to shift their services offerings as to support lower-cost connectivity; gaining greater ARPU by supporting ‘knowledge banking’ related services; yet this in-turn would require a set of rules and relations to apply between telcos and banks.

There are an array of enormous opportunities beyond simply providing connectivity, that telecommunications sector is well-placed to support.

Conversely; there’s an opportunity for ‘NeoBanks’ to completely redefine the terms of telecommunications as to change the dynamics, entirely.

Could Google, Apple and/or Facebook do this sort of thing?

Yes.

It wouldn’t take a great deal for existing global providers such as Google, Apple and Facebook to shift their business frameworks as to become viable ‘knowledge bank providers’ in domestic markets.

One critical components would be their terms of service agreements; alongside an array of other considerations, that are relatively minor overall.

The underlying issue appears to be that current ‘knowledge based capital’ frameworks almost entirely exclude; and therefore act to exploit, natural persons through the purposeful application of governance frameworks.

The consequential series of issues, leads to considerations that for some jurisdictional markets, the opportunity to support humanity is far more of an opportunity than it is, for others. In some present day markets, it may be considered overly inconvenient as USA Leadership (ie: silicon valley systems) provided a form of stability supported by economic ties. Yet this in-turn manifests a situation where other regions have a greater capacity to get it done. Much like the way manufacturing has now developed in asia, alongide customer service infrastructure; people don’t really care where stuff comes from. If these regions built tools that better supported the human rights of persons world-wide; that’s what people will most care about, not where it came from — and as a consequence, radical changes may occur, without notice to those who sought most, to maintain blindness about reality, for the masses.

The reason why we do not have machine readable retail receipts, is not a technology problem and is one of many examples, IMHO simply not good enough.

The online environment, has arguably brought about some of the worst illustrations of business systems built upon slavery.

Web Slavery, supports the beneficial use of another persons work without even acknowledgement of it. One of the known perceived issues about Knowledge Banking is that it is considered to be extremely inconvenient to those who’ve thrived in the market that works in this way.

Means to uphold ‘rule of law’ is an opportunity; that technically, is a global one.

Today, the choice of law terms on most contracts relating to operating systems and web-services, show how the end-user is defined by law to be legal aliens.

This precedent, can be employed by others; to illustrate why their services, are actually better than the ‘status quo’. what seems to matter most historically, is the attribution of economic value to those who’ve made the economic investments.

The major opportunity relates to employment and not the sale of personal data, and this is a deeply flawed yet very much promoted concept by relatively unsophisticated market competitors. Therein, some solutions say they help a consumer ‘own their data’ in a format that in-turn seeks them to go download all their data from the many silos that data is now kept in; and ‘empower’ the consumer through their particular app, which has its own financial gateway.

These ‘early movers’ have not fully supported the growth of standardised data solutions and as a consequence, their business models are no where near similar.

As noted by the ‘permissive commons’ article information of most use for the advancement of a society, should simply be available for those who are sufficiently interested in doing the work, to be made able to do so.

Whilst there are costs involved in undertaking these queries, the idea is to lower the costs involved in advancing humanity to a knowledge age, which is entirely different to building a commercial structure designed to make money out of means that form barriers to make it more difficult (impossible) to achieve.

But all this data in one place — wouldn’t that be dangerous?

Yes. Yet not less dangerous (indeed, if done well far improved) than today.

Reality is that most data that is considered in relation to this system today or in the future will already be stored in relation to a contract that permissively provide the right for the (generally foreign) company to use that data.

As it’s a foreign jurisdiction, human ‘data subjects’ don’t have accessible rights.

People are often harmed in situations that data could have helped ensure never happened; or could have been used to reduce the costs, inclusive of those relating to material harms.

As described in my other ecosystems articles, all of this data can already be brought together as to be made useful, by others. That’s not the hard problem that this knowledge banking industry framework is intended to solve. The big problem is, that the ‘data subject’, natural persons, humanity and our role in our biosphere — that all that data is about, is considered property of artificial entities who shall make use of it for economic gain, whilst protecting themselves from lawful responsibilities by acts that harm human dignity. .

At the end of the day; the systems that best support human dignity, will win.

Those that do not will be illustrated historically, as defined by the winner.

The knowledge banking infrastructure concept is coupled with those otherwise illustrated by the constituent articles published on medium, which all together seek to describe a practical solution for informatics ecosystems.

Whilst remarks such as ‘team human’ are fun, it’s important we invest in a future we want for society, for humanity, for our biosphere as is by causality, manufactured to become real-world parts of reality. Each act a person engages in to build systems that do not support humanity, human dignity, forms a ripple effect across the lives of themselves and others.

In much the same way, making a decision to build a knowledge banking future does so too.

People have done all sorts of awful things in past, but the greatest thing that makes the difference, is to discern whether they knew better when they did so; whether there were options for them to make different choices & whether they knew what they were doing was a choice that harmed others, and did so anyway even when they had the means to make different decisions.

The means to evaluate these choices, exists better in a knowledge age. Some may think they’ve already got those tools, but when the rest of society is equipped to better participate, they can better learn about their mistakes.

and of course moreover, the consequence of them as does relates to reputation.