Digital Information Organism

Atomic Design Methodology is an approach to thinking about systems.  According to this methodology there are four building blocks explained using an analogy to constructing a house:

  • Atoms are basic fundamental building blocks or raw materials and are like 2 by 4s, bricks, cement, and rebar.  Atoms are the lowest level of "stuff" that you work with.
  • Molecules are low level functional units which are made up of two or more atoms held together by a logical “bond”. Continuing with the metaphor of building a house, molecules are things like walls, doors, windows, roof, floor. Molecules are constructed from the atoms.  Molecules are the atoms arranged into slightly more complex and sophisticated structures (i.e. functional units) so that you don't have to work at the level of the atom.
  • Organisms are higher level compound units which are assemblies or groups or structures made up of molecules that form simple working subsystems. My core pattern, the information block, is an example of an organism.  Again continuing with the metaphor of building a house, an organism would be like the house itself.
  • Species are different types or categories of organisms. A species is like different types of houses which might be used for different purposes. Or you might see a "house" as a "physical structure" of some sort like maybe a garage, a warehouse, or a multi-story sky scraper. A neighborhood would be made up of different types of physical structures.
And so it seems to me that the core pattern of information block is really a digital information organism.  The different types of molecules used to construct that digital information organism include the: (these are logical ideas or notions)
  • Element: An element defines an idea or notion used by the information organism. An element may be primitive and therefore not decomposable or an element can be compound and decomposable into a set of primitive elements.  An example of primitive elements might be "assets”, “liabilities”, and “equity”. An example of a compound element might be “balance sheet” or "income statement".
  • Connection: Connections describe permissible relations/associations between elements.  Connections assemble elements into composite units. An example of a connection is the statement "assets is part of the balance sheet" and "liabilities is part of the balance sheet" and "equity is part of the balance sheet".
  • Condition: A condition is something that must always be satisfied. Conditions can be connected using logical connectors (e.g. AND, OR, NOT, NOR, IF) and are made up of logical operators (e.g. +, =, /, *. <, >, ^). An example of a condition is "Assets = Liabilities + Equity". Assertions, restrictions, constraints, and other such rules are conditions.
  • Fact: A fact is a measurement or observation typically expressed with numbers and words. For example, a fact might be “assets for the consolidated legal entity Microsoft as of June 20, 2017 was $241,086,000,000 expressed in US dollars and rounded to the nearest millions of dollars".
It seems that a species is the type of container that holds the organisms which are built using the molecules.  For example, a "financial statement" is one type of species, an "accounting working paper" is another species, an "audit bundle" is another species, and a "financial analysis model" is another species.

And so where do the atoms come in? Atoms or the atomic level stuff is the technical syntax used to physically define the logical ideas or notions (i.e. atoms are the physical instantiation of the molecules). For example, the following are all physical technical syntax: XBRL, RDF and the rest of the semantic web stack, labeled property graphs and the graph query language used to describe those graphs, common separated values (CSV) files, PROLOG.

Here is an example information organism on the top and a digital version of that same information organism below that: (you can have a look at the digital information organism here)


Atomic Design Theory and the notion of the Holon are extremely helpful in explaining the conceptualization of the digital information organism.

Additional Information:

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