Strategic vision for the Federated Web

CoreTalk has developed a Context-based Computing Infrastructure called Cubicon that is based on the following key innovations.

Cubicon displaces text-based programming languages with an executable design language where icon expressions are directly fused to binary representations that execute within distributed context-based Virtual Machines. This simplification of converting human expression to machine processing opens the door for true end-user programming of complex networked systems under the Federated Web. Cubicon is a "meta-standard for standards" technology used to develop system specifications across communities that are expressed as reusable resources. All concept and component resources are recombinant and represented in distributed Community Repositories, enabling the Federated Web and disparate information systems to interoperate at global scale.

Cubicon architecture holistically addresses critical cyberspace challenges, spanning many User-centric Identity, Personal Data Ecosystem, and Federated Web issues.

User-centric Identity

Protecting our nation's cyberspace infrastructure will take a combination of technology along with policy expressed as a new regulation. If implemented properly, the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) could improve security. As an "aspirational" document, the NSTIC paper makes privacy a core principle, but stops short of recommending regulation to ensure identity control. Without a regulation to implement NSTIC, powerful identity credentials will, if lost or stolen, enable hyper-identity theft. Market forces will likely:

— Create a false sense of control, security, and privacy among users,
— Enable new ways to covertly collect users' personal information, and
— Create new markets in which to commoditize human identity."*

* NSTIC's Effect on Privacy, By Identity Finder, LLC

We assert that immature technological standards are challenged to meet the requirements for an Identity Ecosystem that is exemplified by the lack of a common service protocol between identity providers and relying parties. It will take a combination of innovative companies such as CoreTalk interacting with major companies in concert with new federal regulation to secure cyberspace. Cubicon architecture extends NSTIC's Identity Ecosystem to support a trust network by fusing user identity to an entity (a NSTIC subject). Entity is architectural base that supports the full life cycle management of intellectual property (IP) for individuals, businesses, organizations, and governments.

Personal Data Ecosystem

With the computing paradigm rapidly moving to mobile devices with GPS, the level of profiling and surveillance is reaching a new level of information exposure and accompanying security and privacy risks. Cubicon extends the Identity Ecosystem into a Personal Data Ecosystem by supporting the following privacy enhancing capabilities:

— Manage universal identity across providers
— Secure personal cyberspace presence
— Access control over resources through credentials
— Control personal data sharing
— Provide attribute verification
— Rate the reputation of each identity
— Virally empower the digital workforce

A Personal Data Ecosystem must support IP transparency, data portability, and systems interoperability that all require harmonization. Harmonization under Cubicon is the process where independently developed concepts and components with the same "meaning" are automatically fused to each other through contextualization. Contextualization applies across all resources including identity, personal data, and rich dossier information. Whereas PageRank assigns numerical weighing to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, Cubicon's Harmonizer agents traverse topics in Topic Maps and concepts in community-based ontologies to automatically infer and associate shared meaning.

Federated Web

Social media has exploded across the Web into hundreds of platforms, tailored to many diverse community interests, but interoperability between platforms remains a challenge. The Web lacks architecture to enable relationships across social platforms that has resulted in serious fragmentation and devaluation with niche social sites. The Federated Web will allow people to create distributed relationships across cyberspace, while giving people the ability to control their own privacy and data. Cubicon's user-centric architecture can achieve community interoperability, providing the following broad capabilities:

— Matching online with offline social relationships
— Managing personal data in a secure store
— Managing engagement process for vendor relationships
— Controlling service data we produce for others
— Controlling content we create for others
— Understanding our collective knowledge across communities
— Assimilating complex graph relationships through visualizations
— Managing information overload with software agents

The Web is rapidly evolving where it is not the documents, it is the things and people they are about which are important. This market inflection point can be summarized simply as the following; in an ocean of information space, web search results still require human interpretation. Topic Map navigation is directed through mapped topics that allow machine inference of concepts. Cubicon-based software agents analyze concepts to link data in a semantic-based substrate, maintaining user privacy in the Personal Data Ecosystem while optimizing advertising relevance and efficiency. Cubicon will enhance collective knowledge across communities where everything and everybody is connected in context in the Federated Web.