Elements of understanding

At a high level of abstraction, these are components of observing, discussing, and attempting to understand the world. Listed together in the hopes of adding illustrative examples.

Status: very much a draft; individual items are not yet balanced in significance or breadth

Components

Sourcery: Tools to identify + classify data sources (natural world, things in it, dynamic entities, streams these all produce)

Gathering: Tools to capture + gather raw data and derivatives (observations, files, datasets, ecosystems) from ^

Extraction: Tools to extract ever-more structured + synthesized data from ^

Meshing: Tools for timestamping, archiving, granularizing, and tracing provenance of data {including claims about it; alignments, annotations, synthesis}

Naming: Namespaces, extending ostension to increasingly general abstractions and equivalence classes, tools for maintaining and cross-referencing them. [disambiguation]

Consilience: Alignment of concept-nets, ontologies, ^

Quality: Tools + mechanisms for estimating and improving data quality: consistency, reliability, refinement. black/whitelisting for specific contexts.

Visualizing: Tools for encompassing, summarizing, and browsing data across many magnitudes of granularity

Communing: Platforms + processes for sustaining communities of practice (people and automation)