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.'"
Well lets try to turn the parent troll into a valid post (thus causing the troll to disappear into a puff of logic).
How long is it before ATM's / "grocery stores" (supermarkets here) are linked into dating sites and your email?
They know you are looking for a date, and perhaps the ATM gives you messages that the supermarket will give you a good deal on aftershave, and rather than buying beer for consumption at home, you would meet more women if you left the house once in a while.
So, today are we getting excited about tech converging (eg. your phone+camera+pim+kitchen-sink) or are we getting excited about the tech diverging into hundreds of specialised interconnected devices?
;)
With all the 'innovation' these days it's getting hard to keep track
Landrocker
i'm not an expert on the subject.... but, at least in the case of devices like ATMs, which have fairly simple tasks, how would we benefit from a standardized language? i put my PIN in, money comes out, my bank account balance goes down. the elegance of the code behind it doesn't concern me.
i know that "security through obscurity" is a cheesy solution, but i can't help thinking that if every ATM in the country had the same architecture, the system as a whole would be more prone to hacks and abuse. what do you think?
What you have described is modern day bartering... everyone has their own unit of measurement and everyone is willing to negotiate.
Until the marketplace demands a standard, businesses will continue this behavior because it is more profitable in the near term... individuals almost always pay more than conglomerates which is the nature of a trading company who can with 'purchasing power' lower the price for goods or services. So as long as the companies are dealing 'direct' with you the consumer, they can ask for whatever service charge you can bare as an individual... compared to credit unions who get much much better deals as an organization.
So basically it's in all companies best interest to avoid organized clientelle or employees as long as possible in order to maximize profits from low overhead and high margins. Information technology doesn't change this strategy it just adds new levels of complexity.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
And I hate to think about spam that follows you around. Every damned ATM or wall display just has to publically tell you about those magic bean^w^w blue pills that you opt'ed-in to receive messages about.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
You mean, do I want Word or texttools?
That's exactly what you want...
Your cellphone knows about what you've been looking at online, then when you're walking by stores it checks their websites (using bluetooth, and their bluetooth-AP) to see if there's anything there that you might be interested in.
The cellphone doesn't hand out the information to let the server do the thinking, so there are no securityrisks (of that kind) and you can always slap a bayesian filter on the whole thing to make sure that it learns what you're looking at online but aren't interested in IRL (let it be the "always" cheaper computerparts or electric plastic sheep)...
perl -e'print$_{$_} for sort%_=`lynx -dump svanstrom.com/t`'
Did anybody try to read the article ? Holy, that is the type of logic that drove me away from social sciences. And the authors seem to be computer science guys !
Let's see what this is all about:
1) FIND AN OBVIOUS TREND
We think microprocessors are spreading everywhere, and see/predict they doing a lot of things, including communication
2) GIVE IT A SOPHISTICATED SOUNDING NAME
I think I will call it... UbiComp (ubiquitous computing)!.
3) ELABORATE ON WHAT NAMED TREND WILL IMPLY
Computers will be everywhere. People will talk to them. They will talk to people... they will talk with each other ! (claps)
4) WRITE ABOUT WHY IMPLICATIONS DIDN'T HAPPEN
"New forms of interaction must be developed for this environment (...)"
5) PEPPER IT ALL WITH UNBEARABLY OBSCURE PHRASES
"Thoughts exchanged by one another are not the same in one room as in another. This includes "thoughts" exchanged between people and/or machines, and implies that behavior is sensitive to location, and as a consequence of mobility, must adapt to changes in physical and social location." Make sure you make references to lots of other authors and experts.
6) RELEASE TEXT TO A "WANT TO LOOK INTELLECTUAL" AUDIENCE
Which will pretend this is the smartest piece of writing ever, and the uninitiated simply are just not smart enough to understand.
No thanks, I think I can do without concepts like UbiComp.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Applications like this exist, but they are not for access to the general public. It's easy to imagine that with the long-time existence now of "plus cards" at grocery stores, their users have been tracked down to the individual M&M bag, in terms of buying habits. The store can tell you what you're most likely to buy next, and print out coupons for those items.
stuff |
In this case the data is not the problem it is the humans who mahe the rules for what data "counts" and who to believe.
I have been having a similar problem with one credit bureau. From numerous conversations I have concluded that the subject of the report is the last person to be believed.
Similar to the earlier post, the CBs had my address wrong, along with many other things. I called them to correct the obvious typo, they wouldn't unless I sent them a utility bill. So I sent the same utility bill that they used for the first error. That was rejected by them as "too old".
Eventually it was corrected, after more errors on their part, when I had to send them more "proof" that I had paid off other items that were being reported incorrectly and included a new utility bill.
Accordig to the representitives of the CBs, the earlier poster is quite right, they get your address from creditors. If one reports it incorrectly then the incorrect address is taken as fact. They advised me to call everybody on my credit report and verify my address. I advised them to believe the copy of my lease I sent them and I will stop calling the FTC.
The underlying problem still remains. If some creditor inputs my address wrong then it is reported wrong until I discover it.
So, what to do about it? We in the US are a pretty mobile society and folks in general do not inform the credit bureau when they move. Most landlords have no relationship with the CBs either. In fact, where I live the vast majority of landlords rent "off book" ayway, so using landlords as a source is not a good solution.
As much as I am not thrilled with government solutions, the recent changes in credit reporting and lending rules for consumers seem to be a good solutiion to this problem. All of my experience would have been for nothing a few years ago, but now the CBs do correct errors when you document them. Unfortunately, when they make another error you have to document that correction too. The FTC actually does listen now when you call them about recurring problems and they do seem to get results.
None of the underlying data systems have anything to do with this and if it becomes faster it will most probably result in human errors becoming instant disasters rather than minor annoyances.
As for the general complaint in the story that barious gadgets do not use a common language, perhaps Adam Smith would advise to make an invention and create a demand for it. Happened with the FAX machine and with Perl, plus millions of other things.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I have thought about how to implement this and found that Escher's Print Gallery brought me my knees ... why ? here is the story in brief ...
The basic problem is to be able to show the data in 1D, 2D and 3D. Then, there are pseudo dimensions that give rise to 1.5D, 2.5 D, and finally the element of Time T has to be taken into each of these spaces. The crux of the problem is to maintain continuity of "something" that flows between each of these spaces - often in an iterative and recursive fashion. This something can be abstracted as an object (which I call the Bubble, hence my domain name BubbleUI !) and the authors say
To be able to visualize this the best I can do is suggest that you look at the Paint Gallery by MC Escher . and here Just Imagine that the paintings in the Gallery are not Static paintings, but are actually windows looking into the Real World. As the Real World is dynamic, when you revist a given window, it is possible that things might have changed. Then, you will have a good idea of what you mind has to get a handle on, before a user can have "sentient data access."
The concept of visualling the Prints in the Print Gallery as Windows is not too off-base because the Article describes that there is a desire to integrate the physical with the visual ....
And the article also says that there are more than just Static Screens that have to be incorporated
So accomodate the above requirement, imagine now that there is not a single Spectator in the Gallery, but there are many people looking at many "Windows" at the same time. And like in real life these Spectators interact with each other inside the Print Gallery (FIGURE), just as the Real World visible from the Windows is interacting in the background (GROUND)..
After all is said and done, the conclusion that I came up with in the 1st draft of my doctoral thesis (which was rejected and I then approached this subject different which was then accepted) was that the Glue to bind it all is the Cognition of the User - i.e. PortfolioBrowser==User
The User, in my conception, is the PortfolioBrowser. And because of this choice at the center o
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
And that, ladies & gentlemen, is the reason that Wal-Mart will *own* the entire retail market in the US within the decade. They already get $1000/yr from every man, woman, and child in the US.
I did some consulting for a niche retailer last year. After assessing their current technology, I unilaterally recommended that they copy Wal-Mart in every one of their IT decisions. I even called the plan "Operation: Copy Wal-Mart".
The only problem is: it will never work. Small-time retailers can't deal in the inventory levels that Wal-Mart handles. It's hard to automatically reorder stock when you can only carry *two* of an item at a time.
Like I said: I give it 'till 2010 before either 'Brown' is running their business for them or Wal-Mart decides to add a shelf to their stores that puts them out of business.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It takes a lot for general purpose to do better than specialized devices.
Take TiVo for example. Sure, there are a lot of free and non-free software products to make a general purpose computer behave somewhat similarly. For one, I don't know if any of this software can set the computer to wake up at a particular time slot. There is simply no API to communicate to the BIOS or any other hardware to do this. Being able to sleep and wake up on a timer is important to energy efficiency, I doubt a Tivo has a problem with this.
I think "Sentient Data Access" is a bit of a misleading title. What we are talking about here is real world workflow with a set of devices/platforms that are capable of supporting realworld work flow. XML is not the answer as so many have suggested - but a schema much like the BPML and BPEL that *uses* XML and schemas would be required to support this sort functionality.
The article speaks specifically to coordinating the transfer of specific data and instructions between devices in a real world environment. Though in most cases, the instruction could be context sensitive. I.E. if you walk into a Vision Dome with a particular bar code scanned, it could surmised that you want to view that bar code/layout/car within the dome.
Even though the article chastises the world for not having accomplished this yet the reality is that this sort of thing could be implemented today with current technologies. Also the platform could easily use future technologies if designed correctly.
To build such a thing would require an extensible way of definining a process much like VoiceXML, BPML, BPEL. It would also require the ability to define the exchange of data, more importantantly, the device/location/communication channel that the data will be coming from. And finally, it would require a way of easily defining the execution of a process. The last component is really the challenge. Every software package that would participate in this type of environment would need to "listen" for requests and messages that are coming from devices/other systems. Indeed, this sort of pluming is not hardware, but software. As such it would also need to be supported by every operating system, handheld device, and embedded system to be properly integrated into the world at large.
So I say build the language then build the engine.