Attaching a group's own rules to its data

Definition · Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Long usage itself confers authority: a practice that has organized life for generations carries compressed, tested wisdom, even when nobody can articulate its justification.

Analysis

What the labels protect is traditional knowledge, so inherited practice is the material the whole scheme is built around, and the authority asserted belongs to the people whose practice it is. Burke's step is a different one: that long use is itself the ground of authority, even where nobody can say why. The ground given here is authority to control, a standing right of the nation over its own material, which would hold just as firmly over a record made yesterday.

Definition · A. V. Dicey, Law of the Constitution (1885)

Some of a country's most binding norms are never written anywhere — the UK's constitutional conventions bind governments without a single codified sentence. Binding and codified are different properties.

Analysis

The norms that actually govern a given record are the nation's own, and the specification does not state them; it states that the nation has the authority to state them. In that sense the binding content sits outside any document, which is Dicey's distinction honored. But the four principles are published, and the labels through which those norms reach a repository are a fixed and readable vocabulary, so at the point where governing actually happens the order has been written down after all.

Definition · Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Norms change from within a community's practice — gradually, by adjustment — not by decree from outside. The community is the author of its own drift.

Analysis

Authority to control puts a community in charge of its own norms, which is the half of Burke's claim about who authors the change. The other half is not carried. A nation revising what its label permits is deciding, not drifting, and the vocabulary any revision has to be expressed in is maintained outside any single nation. The record before us also describes no mechanism by which a revised norm reaches data already copied out or a model already trained on it, so whatever change occurs stops at the point of release.

Burke and Dicey describe customary orders held in place by a community that is present to hold them, so the question of what governs a practice once it has left the community does not arise. CARE's operationalization answers it by fastening the governing order to the object: a Traditional Knowledge label follows a data record into repositories and training corpora far beyond the nation's reach. The tradition has no equivalent to a custom that moves with a thing.