Understanding the 5 Key Goals of the Networked Electronic Information Society

Every time you check a bank balance from your phone at midnight, read a research paper hosted on a server in another continent, or verify your identity online without standing in a queue, you are living inside a vision that information scientists sketched out decades ago. That vision is the Networked Electronic Information Society (NEIS), an idealised model of a world where information moves freely across networks, devices, and borders. The NEIS framework grows out of the convergence of telecommunications, computing, and media, and it is usually explained through five key goals. These goals describe what a mature, networked society should be able to offer every person. Let us walk through each of them and see how close we already are.

What the Networked Electronic Information Society really means 🔗

The NEIS is not a single technology or product. It is a long-term direction for how societies organise the creation, storage, transmission, and use of information. Earlier societies were built around physical infrastructure such as roads, railways, and postal systems. The networked society is built around electronic networks that link people, machines, and databases into one continuous web. The shift is from holding information to accessing it. As libraries themselves moved towards electronic resources, the emphasis changed from owning physical collections to acting as gateways to remotely stored information, a transition documented widely in the literature on networked electronic information resources.

The driving force behind the NEIS is convergence, the merging of computing, communication, and content into common digital formats. Once text, audio, images, and video are all reduced to digital bits travelling over shared networks, the old boundaries between a telephone, a television, a computer, and a printing press begin to dissolve. The five goals of the NEIS describe what this convergence should ultimately deliver to ordinary users. Organisations such as the Coalition for Networked Information were formed precisely to push this transformation forward for scholarship and society.

“Anyone, any time” access 🔗

The first and most defining goal of the NEIS is ubiquitous access. The promise is simple to state: information and services should be available to anyone, at any time, regardless of where they are or what hour it is. There should be no “office is closed” sign on the network. A student preparing for an exam at 3 a.m., a farmer checking a weather advisory, and a patient looking up a government health scheme should all be able to reach what they need without waiting for a counter to open.

How the infrastructure supports 24/7 connectivity 🔗

This round-the-clock availability rests on layers of infrastructure working together. Fibre-optic backbones carry data between cities and countries. Mobile networks extend that reach to handheld devices in villages and on trains. Data centres keep servers running continuously so that a website never sleeps. The growth of mobile connectivity has been central to this in the Indian context, where mobile subscriptions climbed steeply, moving the country towards near-universal access to phones and, increasingly, to the internet.

Government platforms built under the Digital India programme show this goal in action. Citizen-facing services such as e-Hospital registration, online tax filing, and digital payments are designed to run around the clock. The Unified Payments Interface, for instance, lets people send money at any time of day, including weekends and holidays. The “anyone, any time” goal is therefore not just about technology being switched on; it is about designing services that assume continuous, on-demand use.

Location independence and universal access 🔗

The second goal builds on the first. In a fully networked society, where you physically are should not decide what you can access. This is the principle of location independence. Your documents, your money, your identity, and your services should follow you, not the other way around.

The shift towards universal access 🔗

Universal access means that the network treats a user in a remote district the same as a user in a metro city. The infrastructure aims to remove geography as a barrier. A practical example is DigiLocker, the cloud-based document platform under Digital India. Once a person stores a driving licence, an education certificate, or an Aadhaar document there, it can be retrieved and shared from anywhere, removing the need to carry physical files or visit the issuing office in person.

Personalised identification 🔗

Location independence only works if the network can reliably recognise who you are. This is where personalised identification becomes the backbone of the whole goal. India’s Aadhaar system offers one of the world’s largest examples. The Unique Identification Authority of India issues a 12-digit number linked to a person’s biometric and demographic data, allowing residents to authenticate themselves anytime and anywhere. Importantly, the design was kept privacy-conscious: the Aadhaar number is a random number with no built-in profiling information, and verification often returns only a yes-or-no answer to an identity claim rather than exposing personal details.

This single, portable identity has become the foundation of a wider digital ecosystem. As the India Stack documentation explains, Aadhaar-based authentication can be combined with documents and payments to build identity workflows that follow a person across services. Personalised identification is what turns “access from anywhere” into “your services, from anywhere” with security and trust attached.

Machine translation and the future of language 🔗

The third goal addresses a barrier that physical networks alone cannot solve: language. A truly global information society cannot expect every user to read English. The NEIS therefore aims for machine translation so robust that language ceases to limit who can use a piece of information. A document written in Tamil should be readable in French, and a webpage in Japanese should be usable by a reader in Bengal, without a human translator in between.

Why an intermediate language matters 🔗

Translating directly between every pair of languages is enormously complex. A more efficient approach is to translate each language into a single, precise intermediate representation, and then translate from that representation into the target language. This intermediate language must be unambiguous, because computers struggle with the vagueness and double meanings that human languages tolerate so easily.

The case for Sanskrit 🔗

This is where a striking idea enters the discussion. In a 1985 paper in AI Magazine, NASA researcher Rick Briggs argued that Sanskrit could serve as a natural language that also functions as an artificial language for knowledge representation. He showed that the methods classical Sanskrit grammarians used to paraphrase sentences closely resemble the semantic networks used in artificial intelligence, suggesting that much AI work had effectively been reinventing a very old wheel. The appeal of Sanskrit lies in its highly regular, rule-based grammar codified by Panini, and its phonetic consistency, where words are written as they are spoken.

Because of this structure, some researchers have explored Sanskrit as a candidate intermediate language for machine translation, and considerable modern work now focuses on building machine translation systems for Sanskrit using natural language processing and neural networks. It is worth being honest about the limits here. Sanskrit is a low-resource language for computing, meaning there is far less digital training data than for English or Hindi, and its features such as sandhi and heavy compounding make it genuinely difficult for current systems. The vision of Sanskrit as a universal bridge language remains more aspiration than reality, but the underlying NEIS goal stands firm: language should not decide who gets to use the world’s knowledge.

Universal service delivery and seamless integration 🔗

The remaining two goals tie the first three together. The fourth goal is universal and personalised service delivery. The network should not only give you access to raw information; it should give you information that is relevant and actionable for your situation. A government portal should let you complete a task, not just read about it. An online course should help you learn a skill, and a health service should help you make a real decision.

The fifth goal is seamless integration. The many systems that make up the network, such as identity, documents, payments, and communication, should work together smoothly rather than as disconnected silos. India’s JAM trinity, which links Jan Dhan bank accounts, Aadhaar, and mobile phones, is often cited as an example of this kind of integration, because it allows benefits to be transferred directly to verified individuals through connected systems. When identity, money, and communication interlock, a citizen can complete an entire transaction in one continuous flow rather than repeating steps across separate offices.

Why these goals matter for information professionals 🔗

For students of library and information science, the five NEIS goals are more than a textbook list. They describe the environment in which modern information services operate. Libraries today are judged less by the size of their physical shelves and more by the quality of access they provide to networked resources. Understanding ubiquitous access helps explain why digital libraries run continuously. Understanding location independence and personalised identification explains how authenticated access to subscribed databases works. Understanding machine translation explains why multilingual access is becoming a core service rather than a luxury. The NEIS goals, taken together, form a checklist for an inclusive and intelligent information society, and the gaps that remain are exactly where the next generation of information professionals will do their most important work.

What do you think? Which of the five NEIS goals do you believe India has come closest to achieving, and which one still has the longest distance to travel? And if a single intermediate language were ever adopted for machine translation, do you think a structured classical language like Sanskrit would serve better than a widely spoken modern one?

References

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/28810543_Networked_electronic_information_resources_NEIR_some_instructive_thoughts
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_for_Networked_Information
3. https://www.cgdev.org/publication/building-digital-id-inclusive-services-lessons-india
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_India
5. https://services.india.gov.in/service/detail/unique-identification-authority-of-india-uidai
6. https://uidai.gov.in/en/about-uidai/unique-identification-authority-of-india/vision-mission.html
7. https://chandlergovernance.com/governancematters/indias-aadhaar-system-bringing-e-government-to-life
8. https://indiastack.org/identity.html
9. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1609/aimag.v6i1.466
10. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050920307729