Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I guess starting out a scientific paper with "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if..", but their paper really needs it.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.