Principles for Robustly Interoperable Digital Objects

I have been ruminating on core values in service of stewardship of evolving scientific knowledge.

Specifically, what principles can I lean upon to guide me in the design of robustly interoperable digital objects?

Here is what has jelled so far for me:

1. Machine Interpretation

   • rectifies and amplifies formal modeling

   • facilitates machine action

   • requires that both bits and semantics are accessible

2. Least Power

   • constrained interpretation promotes interoperability

   • lower barrier to support diverse and unanticipated use cases

   • behavior is more likely to be understood and predicted with high confidence

3. Stationary Action

   • small deviations from intended sequence-of-processes (i.e. task path) does not require large compensating efforts to reach intended outcome.

   • emphases monotonicity, smooth steering, and suitable granularity of progress.

   • emphasizes resilience of desired budget over desired schedule rather than minimization of initial budget over initial schedule.

4. Logic + Control

   • facilitates declarative programming

   • facilitates flexibility in choices of performance tradeoffs

   • promotes reuse

5. Delta Encoding

   • facilitates provenance

   • facilitates revision control

   • facilitates pub/sub for selective search and retrieval