Abstract: Civium® is a global public information commons that aspires to unite the world’s basic factual information in a radically distributed peer-to-peer network, based on a structure entirely different from the Web’s. It is a seamless fabric of hard facts— accessed via a novel mapping interface known as the Civium® Geobrowser—embroidered with constantly expanding threads of public insights and observations. Civium® balances the tension between rigid editorial control and free-for-all, user-contributed chaos by defining an extensive framework of tens of millions of definitive, factual data items (derived from authoritative public sources), around which unstructured, user-contributed data may accrue without central control. The intent is to nurture this data set as an enduring, freely-available public resource. The implications for tourists are enormous. They can access, expand and drill into all pertinent information about their vacation spot via a visually intuitive geo-browser: hotels, restaurants, attractions, transportation, real-time and historical weather reports, etc. As they look deeper, they find a constantly expanding, interactive community of other tourists who have visited that spot, eaten at that restaurant, boarded that train…complete with their must-see photos, impressions and experiences. By uniting authoritative and user-contributed data into a single information space, Civium® provides a seamless “one world” view of information of all kinds. Civium®‘s magic is in its ability to accommodate infinite perspectives.
Presented at Vision Plus 10, an international information-design symposium held in Lech/Arlberg, Austria, September 2003.