Conceptual Framework

Cross-Organization Goal

Our goal is to create a single model for publishing ethical consumer information that is general enough to incorporate each organization's existing information structure.

What follows is a simple "straw man" to get the ball rolling. The full model will emerge as each organization documents its own model.

Strawman

• entity: Real world entity; eg, company, product, certifier, source
• discussion: Textual information about an entity's real world impacts; eg, article, summarization, review, response
• category: Type of real world impact or consumer interest; eg, transparency, human rights, global warming, quality, objectivity
• rating: Numeric representation of entity's social impact. May be assigned or computed. May be overall or category-specific.
• ranking: Ordinal position of entity's social impact. May be assigned or computed. May be overall or category-specific.

Organization Model Pages

• Bilumi
• EasyEthical
• EthicalConsumer

Summary

The following table summarizes the subset and terminology of each organization model compared to the full model.

Strawman Model	Bilumi
entity	node
discussion	review
category	interest
discussion ratings	x
entity ratings	x (rating, score)
discussion rankings
entity rankings
Additional Features	Bilumi
entity hierarchy, aggregated ratings	x
entity types	x
entity edge types	x
category hierarchy	x
evaluations, user status	x
per category discussion ratings	x
per category entity ratings	x
overall entity rating	score
sources are entities	x
item versioning	state, action

key

• x indicates "yes, we model that"
• synonym indicates "yes, we model that but call it something else"
• blank indicates "no, we do not model that"

Diagram Notes

Please contribute. We are especially looking forward to each organization contributing a diagram of "how we think about things" and "external API".

The .png's with corresponding .graffle files were made using OmniGraffle, which only runs on MacOS. We also recommend using xfig, an open source vector graphics editor which runs under the X Window System.

We hope these diagrams are comprehensible by people with varied background. That is, the meanings should be clear from context, not by looking up a technical notation. Diagrams that present additional perspectives, technical or otherwise, are fine as supplements. Since we've chosen an object model -esque approach, examples can be especially useful, too. Thoughts?