Sentient Data Access

CowboyRobot writes "From Queue comes a piece subtitled Why doesn't your data know more about you? From the article: 'It has been more than ten years since such information appliances as ATMs and grocery store UPC checkout counters were introduced. ... A common language for these devices has not been standardized, nor have current database solutions sufficiently captured the complexities involved in correctly expressing multifaceted data. ... As computing devices expand from the status-quo keyboard and desktop to a variety of form factors and scales, we can imagine workplaces configured to have a society of devices, each designed for a very specific task. As a whole, the collection of devices may act much like a workshop in the physical world, where the data moves among the specialized digital stations. For our society of devices to operate seamlessly, a mechanism will be required to (a) transport data between devices and (b) have it appear at each workstation, or tool, in the appropriate representation.'"

Comments

Obsequious computing

[AndroidCat]

Granted that they were writing to a narrow audience, but the style is pretty opaque unless you spend time boiling it down like maple sap to get the meaning.

I guess starting out a scientific paper with "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if..", but their paper really needs it.

Misconception

[Tom]

From Queue comes a piece ...that shows clearly just how little the author knows about computing.

The entire point of computers is that they are general purpose devices. The "workshop" idea surely sounds cool to someone who doesn't know about computers, because it resembles the world before "general purpose" was a graspable concept.

Would I rather want my workplace to be a collection of specialized devices, or a single device that can be configured to be any of the others, plus whatever else or new is necessary? Now that's a difficult question, right?

RISKS Hell?

[localroger]

This is a nightmare scenario for anyone who is familiar with how data systems fail. I once had a credit agency pick up a very old P.O. box I hadn't used for years and suddenly decide it was my current address, so all my mail from them went into a black hole; this bad address propagated through the credit world for nearly a year, during which I had to call regularly and request copies of bills and get the address changed back.

In the system described here, once bad data gets into your microwave oven there's virtually no way to chase down all the instances of it that will be floating around the universe. Didn't Sandra Bullock star in a movie about this once?

Semantic Web, Ontology Mapping, Trust

[SandHawk]

XML only solves the first problems of data merging, like making the formats easy to parse correctly and using the right international character set.

RDF/XML solves a bit more of the problem, making the structure of the information clear, in terms of assertional statements. An RDF/XML file is a knowledge base, full of statements saying this has some particular relationship to that. It lets the machines get at more of the information in a uniforn, universal way.

But still, the problem of ontology/schema/vocabulary mapping remains: if one system is talking about patients and another is talking about clients, they might or might not really be talking about the same thing. A single person maybe never counts as two patients but sometimes counts as two clients, etc. At least with the data in RDF, most of this mapping can be done in software once a person figures it out and expresses it in a suitable logic language.

The emerging design of the Semantic Web hopes to make that reasonable, but also to support convergence on common vocabularies by having everything on the web -- if it's trivial to see what vocabularies are already being used, people will mostly only make new ones when the old ones really are different.

Other hard problems remain, of course, like figuring out which data sources to trust. Fun fun.

I have a theory about why this is not happening

[Featureless]

It's simple: There are not many good reasons for it to happen, to any greater extent that it already is.

Frankly, this just stinks of that old chestnut about interconnected toasters and refrigerators and power drills sharing data seamlessly on a home network. I was never quite able to get thrilled about this kind of thinking when I first heard it, and it rings more hollow every time I've heard it since, which is about a million times, over decades.

I think the big problem here is that there isn't much of a problem to solve. I'm sure that, when we have even more portable and ubiquitous computers and communication all around us, we'll just be deluged with new applications for it that we just can't quite think of right now, but we don't yet. And you can't chalk it all up to "technology isn't ready yet." No, I think it's related to demand, more than supply.

As far as I can tell, there aren't many killer apps that fall well under this umbrella, and those few that there are can't begin to justify the expense of the hardware and software involved, now, or probably for another decade or two.

One thing that always gets me about this line of thinking is that even the examples they lead with tend to be uninspiring and ridiculous: ATMs and grocery store checkouts sharing programming languages and databases? Complicating the "workplace" with converged, general-purpose computing solutions by littering it with specialized information tools? Come on, guys, this is freakin stupid. Does standardizing on a sigle end-all-be-all computer language, OS, or database sound like a good idea to anyone? Or particularly original? What about "un-converging" to any greater extent than we already are? Or is there some new information tool that will change everything?

I'm sure as soon as someone actually has a real idea that's plausible enough for science fiction, we'll all get excited about being the first to make it happen.

The article does hint at a few more interesting things; that hierarchical filesystems may be overrated and due for reexamination as the bedrock of computing (although truthfully this is already well in progress - PalmOS? Newton?), that we might see more kiosk or application-specific computers... more "specialized devices" solving problems out in the world... now selling tickets, now portable computerized maps giving directions, perhaps more active displays "everywhere," primarily driven by advertising, but perhaps justified by various underlying civic duties, and location-based computing is undoubtedly going to be more important, as it finally becomes cheap enough to be a factor...

But these are all just hints. Barely that.

But overall I find this to be just another valueless futurist rant, devoid of real ideas, coasting on buzzwords and hype, and basically irrelevant to anyone seriously thinking about the future... or at least, nothing you haven't heard before a million times.

It's ClippyWear not UbiWear!

[AndroidCat]

In spite of lofty ideals, we know what the application would look like: Imagine the worst qualities of Clippy, Talky-Toaster, and Genuine People Personalities, stir in some 1984 and Brazil.