Mission Statement¶

Xalgorithms Mission Statement (This current text is not a mission statement)

The future Internet will separate prerogative for data control, application control and network control. (Internet Society, 2019). The future Web will enable each agent’s prerogative for autonomous data control. (Tim Berners-Lee & Ruben Verborgh, Inrupt, 2019). This decoupling of data control from functional applications is based upon the prerogative of individuals and entities for fine-grained management of their data resources.
Xalgorithms Foundation has convened the collaborative design of the ‘oughtomation’ specification along with a set of operational reference implementations under 100% free/libre/open licenses. A specification is considered generalizable where there are at least three working reference implementations using different platforms and programming languages. A reference implementation consists of working software under free/libre/open licensing that demonstrates usability, purpose and intended operation. Priorities are ease of maintenance and personnel on-boarding, whereas genuine deployments prioritize for performance.

Our purpose is to enable a distributed, general purpose method for any person to author, publish, discover, fetch, scrutinize, prioritize and optionally automate normative rules on digital networks with precision, simplicity, scale, volume and speed. This would enable context-senstitive event-triggered transmission of concise, current, personalized information about normative rules (MUST, MAY and SHOULD, and their synonyms and negatives) to data users (individuals, organizations and/or machines) through their diverse applications and platforms at a high level of granularity when they are ‘in effect’ for given dates/times, identities and jurisdictions, are ‘applicable’ to the scenario, and ‘invoked’ by circumstances. The resulting channel of communication is referred to as "an Internet of Rules".
The design of oughtomation is suitable for expressing any type of normative rule in natural but structured language, to simplify human-readability and comprehension of rules, while also enabling computer-executable operation on any computing platform or application, in any language and jurisdictional context.