We Can Define the Domain of Information Online and Thus Globally Uniformly

Abstract

Any information is (transported as) a selection from an ordered set, which is the “domain” of the information. For example, any piece of digital information is a number sequence that represents such a selection. Its senders and receivers (with software) should know the format and domain of the number sequence in a uniform way worldwide. So far, this is not guaranteed. However, it can be guaranteed after the introduction of the new “Domain Vector” (DV) data structure: “UL plus number sequence”. Thereby “UL” is a “Uniform Locator”, which is an efficient global pointer to the machine-readable online definition of the number sequence. The online definition can be adapted to the application so that the DV represents the application-specific, reproducible features in a precise (one-to-one), comparable, and globally searchable manner. The systematic, nestable online definition of domains of digital information (number sequences) and the globally defined DV data structure have great technical potential and are recommended as a central focus of future computer science.