PKC/Design Rationale

The design rationale PKC borrows ideas from the original design of Wikis. The specific concerns of PKC is explained in the page: Why PKC?. Transcluded below:

PKC is created to reduce information asymmetry in this data-driven era. It aims at solving the following three aspects of challenges.

Participatory Design:

PKC, short for Personal Knowledge Container, is an open source technology platform primarily built using Docker Container, MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki. It is aimed at enabling Participatory Design by minimizing the technical hurdles, and maximizing user-friendly features for organizations of any size to own and exchange data assets using hyperlinked web pages. It invites users with access to web browser-enable user interfaces to get involved with the publishing workflow of digital content.

Data Sovereignty:

PKC allows data to be collected and annotated, using MediaWiki software as a "Data dictionary" substrate, and enables the same format of data dictionaries to be hosted by the broadest possible range of computing devices and network environments. Most importantly, allowing individuals and small organizations to possess this symmetric data processing capability on their own networks or personal computing devices, such as laptops and personal computers, and allow them to publish these content globally when they see fit. Currently, PKC has been tested on Linux, Windows, and Mac platforms, and allows the mixture of running instances of PKCs in both isolated private networks, or publicly connected networks with a consistent data asset naming convention. This universal abstraction of data asset representation and network access partitioning strategy allows users to collect and use data in a consistent creative workflow with a unifying asset accounting system. This asset accounting system leverages existing data content version control technologies and cryptographic signature processing mechanisms to ensure data sovereignty.

Enlightened Metrics:

The success metrics of every instance of PKC is defined by user statistics in witnessed spacetime. The quality of data content is measured by a function composed of three foundational factors: 1) number of witness accounts, 2) the length of page history, and 3) and the linkages of other wiki pages pointed at the data content annotated in a PKC-compliant wiki page. Without losing generality, the trust-worthiness of all linked data elements can be computationally interpreted based on the linkage structures, and therefore provides a traceable mechanism to investigate and compare the meaning of possible interpretations. By presenting humanly processable data content (web pages) in a unifying linkage data standard, while distribute the same data linkage standard across scalable and federated network mediums, such as TCP/IP, Virtual Private Networks, and other means of data distribution technologies, PKC will allow many independent data sources to reach a broad range of interpretation by maintaining linkages to grounding evidence that fuel the reasoning activities of potentially enlightened minds.