Factpage: Cardano fact check site

More about the problem:

Whether something truly happened or was said in the real world is a matter of fact. Either it did or it didn't. We need to be in agreement on at least the veracity of these facts before we can make our own informed opinions about what we perceive to be true.

With this distinction in mind, Factpage is not claiming to be the source of "universal truth" about Cardano news. Its objective is to be the best trustworthy, neutral source for "facts" about sources of new information about Cardano. Then Factpage users, each with their own pre-conceived biases and worldviews, can at least create their own informed opinion in a more reliable way; rather than second-guessing whether they are forming their views from false information resources.

In short, Factpage does not want to "control the narrative", rather, its goal is to "nurture true narratives."

More about our solution:

The Factpage project will capture and archive media about Cardano created by reputable original sources such as the Cardano Foundation, IOG, Emurgo, Cardano360, Charles Hoskinson, John O'Connor, etc.. This may include formats such as MP4 video converted from YouTube videos, WARC web archive packages from webpage publications, PDFs of journal articles, or public Twitter tweets.

Factpage will develop a Cardano "news" taxonomy to classify the types of media content and formats that it is archiving. This will assist the public in searching for and discovering authentic Cardano information relevant to their fact-checking inquiry. The taxonomy will also be a starting point for training automated tools to perform deeper analysis of the content that is provided via Factpage. Given the sheer volume of daily news about Cardano that will only grow over time, any long-term solution will have to leverage deep learning technology to assist in processing and classifying newly captured content.

The project will host a proof-of-fact explorer at https://fact.page This will enable end-users to "trust but verify" information about the Cardano blockchain via a user-friendly interface. The fact.page explorer will expose the the off-chain, verifiable audit trails that its development team is implementing as part of the Project Catalyst Fund 6 Orcfax project. (1)

These audit trails implement the principle of "archival bond" which is the primary principle used in archival science to demonstrate the authenticity and trustworthiness of archived information. (2) (3) Orcfax is implementing this traditional practice in a decentralized architecture that leverages W3C standards for recording the provenance of information sources and the details of its capture (PROV-O) as well as verifying the trustworthiness and authority of documentation sources (Verifiable Claims).

All new media resources captured into the Factpage archival collection will be stored on IPFS nodes, described and classified using Schema.org JSON-LD metadata, and inextricably linked in an immutable Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure. The cryptographic hash of each media item will be time-stamped and traceable via Cardano blockchain notarization. The Orcfax whitepaper explains how the combination of these technologies and processes create a trustworthy "proof-of-fact".

End-users can verify these provenance audit trails through their own trusted Cardano explorer (for the notarization records), the explorer hosted by the Orcfax project at https://fact.page (for the archived media), or bypassing all centralized access points by using the Content Identifier (CID) for each media item on their own local IPFS node

During the initial pilot phase of the project, the process of appraising, capturing, and curating online content will be done by the Factpage development team using web archiving, web scraping, and API requests methods. When these various tools can be reliably automated, in particular the Cardano news classification taxonomy, Factpage will turn to a decentralized model. Our evaluation of existing fact-checking services demonstrate that a statement of fact is most trustworthy if it is derived from multiple independent sources.

We believe Factpage is a direct answer to the success criteria for this "Disarm cyber disinformation attacks" Fund 7 Challenge which includes: "Truth about Cardano and ongoing and past events is easy to establish even for newcomers. Trust not being eroded. Transparency is enhanced."

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References:

(1) Orcfax Fund 6 proposal (2021) https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Orcfax-trustworthy-Cardano-oracles/367650-48088

(2) Building Decentralized Trust (2021) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-54414-0

(3) Examining the evidentiary value of e-signed documents (2021) http://acikerisim.istanbul.edu.tr/handle/20.500.12627/167875

Licensing:

Auditability of source code is an important contributing factor to the overall trustworthiness of any effective solution to the disinformation problem. Therefore, all Factpage software will be published under the permissive, open-source MIT license. All software documentation will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-4.0-International (CC BY-ND 4.0) licence.

Our core team:

Peter Van Garderen. Lead developer, Orcfax project.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/petervangarderen/

Peter is a professional archivist with a graduate degree in archival science and a distinguished alumnus designation from the University of British Columbia's Information School. Dating back to medieval times, the archival profession has maintained standards and practices for protecting and demonstrating the authenticity of information resources.

Peter is a pioneer in developing free and open-source software (FOSS) that implements industry standards for trustworthy archival repositories. The Archivematica and AccessToMemory FOSS solutions he developed are used by thousands of memory institutions worldwide to preserve and provide access to authentic documents.

Dr. Hossein Maserrat. Lead developer, Orcfax project.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hossein-maserrat-72529653/

Hossein is a mathematician and computer science PhD. He left academia over a decade ago to apply his expertise to data-intensive production systems, including analytics, data mining, recommender systems, machine learning and deep learning. He has extensive industry experience deploying highly-scalable cloud infrastructure. Hossein is currently applying his hands-on knowledge to architect and prototype the Orcfax trustworthy oracle solution on the Cardano eUTXO infrastructure.

Our roadmap to success:

After one month:

1. Use case stories
2. Proof-of-concept: Orcfax media capture for Cardano news sources
3. Blog post: technical update

After two months:

1. Proof-of-concept: fact.page discovery interface
2. Technical architecture documentation
3. Blog post: technical update

After three months:

1. MVP: full-stack Factpage solution (discovery UI + IPFS archiving)
2. Cardano news taxonomy
3. End user documentation
4. Proof-of-concept: deep learning classification of Cardano-related media content
5. Blog post: technical update
6. Blog post: Fund 7 pilot project findings

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After six months:

1. Production-ready Factpage service.
2. Factpage is recognized as the go-to, independent source of reliable facts about Cardano news sources.
3. Pilot project launched to apply the Factpage methodology and tools to other real-world events.

After one year:

1. Factpage operates using fully automated media capture and content classification.
2. Factpage is recognized as one of the best, independent sources of reliable facts about real-world events.

Our budget:

• 15 hours per week x $75/USD x 12 weeks x two developers = $27,000
• Monthly server costs and other subscription fees = $500/month x 3 months = $1,500

Peter and Hossein are in high-demand as private consultants and charge much higher rates in those scenarios. They both live in Vancouver, Canada which has a very high cost of living compared to most other Global North cities. Therefore, their $75/hr rate for the Factpage project is a reasonable middle-ground between respecting the limited funding pool in this Project Catalyst challenge while also ensuring they don't have to seek additional outside work that will disturb their focus and energy during the 12 week Factpage Phase 1 development period.

The Factpage Phase 1 project will run in parallel to Orcfax phase 2 development between March 1, 2022 and May 31, 2022. The team members will provide their own computing equipment. Hosting for the project website and code repositories are provided free of charge via Github. Community outreach will be done via (free) Twitter and YouTube accounts as well as the various Project Catalyst communication channels.