What should we do today to influence the global information infrastructure so as to maximize the accessibility of relevant data and information worldwide for decades to come?
Among science organizations and throughout democratic societies, there is a basic premise that information infrastructures should enhance the free flow of data, information, and ideas. Yet, it is also recognized the global information infrastructure will be built primarily to serve interests other than long-term Earth systems monitoring and natural resources management. If the free flow of ideas is to be enhanced in a way that is sustainable over the long term, it will be through finding common solutions with commercial and entertainment interests rather than through government fiat.
A great strength of the emerging Global Information Society is the wide diversity evident in the many separate but overlapping perspectives and authority regimes. At this moment in history, virtually all nations appreciate that they should not dictate to other nations how to manage information, and that highly centralized approaches are often dangerous even from a strictly operational perspective. It follows that any information standard intended for global use should not presume central authorities or a master index of information. Rather, global information standards need to embrace interoperable but very decentralized approaches.
Although more complex to design, such interoperable and decentralized approaches are entirely feasible. Common standards employed in bibliographic cataloging provide a measure of interoperability across independently maintained libraries, while allowing wide latitude in how collections are developed and organized. Anyone can use the catalog standards to any extent desired and for any purpose whatsoever. Open standards from the library and information services communities have now evolved to take advantage of public networks such as the Internet. Happily these international standards are sensitive to the world's many languages, and to legal and financial issues such as copyright, security, privacy, and payments.
In accepting this challenge to influence the Global Information Infrastructure in a fundamental way, one must accept the bare fact of the currently primitive facilities for dealing with human knowledge in its myriad contexts. People have barely begun to understand how to handle complex information at the personal and corporate level. Much less clearly can ways be seen to facilitate the exchange of knowledge or to model the interactions of information organizations among whole societies.
Continuous evolution and drastic revolutions must be expected. Yet, there are immediate strategies that seem worthwhile to pursue. While access mechanisms such as user interfaces, data base technologies, and network protocols change at a frequency of every few months, certain fundamental aspects have persisted for many decades and continue to carry long term implications. For example, people searching for information resources typically need clues regarding: What is it about? Who created it?, When was it published?, Where is it available?, etc.
As technology, GILS primarily addresses one fundamental aspect of information access--the ways in which the characteristics of information resources are exposed to searching. It happens that this technological approach is also useful in the context of policy initiatives intended to promote diversity of information access without sacrificing coherence.