Category Archives: Information Philosophy

What are information and data? How do they represent what they represent? What are we doing when we record and use information? These questions are philosophical, but also deeply pragmatic. This category collects posts that deal more with this sort of question than with technical issues.

The two cultures

Jon Stokes has an excellent description of the two contrasting philosophies of information management in his comparison of the Palm Pre and the iPhone. He names the two approaches “structure-and-browse” and “collect-and-query”. I feel like I’ve been groping for these … Continue reading

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OpenStreetMap constructs maps from GPS tracks!

Sources and uses of digital information are in-scope for this blog, and a great example just showed up in my RSS reader today. OpenStreetMap is a wiki-like project to build a world map using contributed GPS tracks [OpenGeoData pointed me … Continue reading

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Information Patterns: series introduction

Every time a new data format spec hits my inbox, I get a little twinge of dread. Such documents are often enormous. They’re written in standardese (often badly). They’re usually written by committees. They go through a maze of twisty … Continue reading

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Kent’s Data and Reality [book pointer]

Let me kick off this blog by pointing to William Kent’s classic book Data and Reality. Lots of books will teach you how to process data with particular technologies, but Kent’s book goes deeper. He shows in chapter after chapter … Continue reading

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