Construction of a Digitally Represented Person by Personal Data: A Multidimensional Framework from an Inforg Perspective

The amount of data a related to a person is so substantial that it appears that a digital version of them can be built thereon. They are usually handled as personal information, and the attempts made to understand personal information have led to bundling and unbundling of various data, yielding numerous fragmented categories of personal information. Therefore, we attempt to construct a generalizable lens for a deeper understanding of person-related data. We develop a theoretical framework that provides a fundamental method to understand these data as an entity of a digitally represented person based on literature review as well as the concepts of inforg and infosphere. The proposed framework suggests person-related data consist of three informational inforg dimensions that can preserve the archetype of a person, form, content, and interaction. Subsequently, the framework is examined and tested through several analyses in two different contexts: social media and online shopping mall. This framework demonstrates the suggested dimensions are interrelated with certain patterns, the prominent dimension can determine the data characteristics, and the dimensional composition of data types can imply the characteristics of the digitally represented person in certain contexts.