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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 dunno. I'm not sure I want my cell phone to know where my browser has been.
Isn't this what XML is for? Communication of any data types?
That sounds like a bad Soviet Russia joke ;^)
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.
With so many standards running around and devices intentionally not complying with them, I doubt this would kick off in the near future.
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
It's called Universal Plug and Play and despite appearances it is gaining popularity.
I have been pwned because my
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.
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.
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
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?
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
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.
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.
They know you are looking for a date
As a privacy advocate, I guess this means I'll be buying hand lotion and "reading material" in separate trips to different supermarkets!
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
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.
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.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
"It has been more than ten years since such information appliances as ATMs and grocery store UPC checkout counters were introduced"
Try 30+ years for UPC. They came about back around 72 at Krogers in Ohio. And ATMs...at least 20+ years, but that Google is left as an exercise to the reader.
Just another day in Paradise
So why oh why does it remind me to take the receipt when I told it no receipt? It is not printing one out so somewhere in its memory a flag is set. So why can't the last message be adjusted to reflect it? It is a very simple thing to do. I think you learn this kind of thing in the second chapter of any programming book.
I think until such simple things are realised (I seen people waiting for a receipt that is not going to appear making the throughput of the machine slower wich is not good on a busy shoppping day) we can forget such machines ever becoming even the slightest bit intelligent and say use your name to greet you. Let alone be able to give you say access to you bank statements of that month to see if the rent has already been deducted.
Oh and this behaviour is spotted on ATM's in holland in several different models belonging to different banks (our cards work with all banks)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Slow day on slashdot? Why else has somebody posted a mediocre business-school masters "IT management" "research" quality humdrum thesis topic as an interesting article?
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 |
If my memory serves me correctly, the Fritz chip is the basis of the Trusted Computing Platform (Palladium) which would give uber control of your computer to the powers that be (But you already knew that, didn't you ;)) Combining such "sentient data" with the Fritz chip could effectively result in your computer reporting you or your ATM turning you in. It is a serious threat to those of us which sport foil hats, not off topic ranting.
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.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing still starts in the military world. The DoD has been developing requirements for Network Centric Warfare (NCW). Basically turning warfare interfaces into a RTS game like StarCraft, C&C, complete with fog-of-war, semi-autonomous units, comm & data sharing, etc. On the technical side, this is manifesting itself as Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) architecture. One of the first actual implementations is being worked in in the form of Future Combat Systems (FCS).
These are complex systems, so the DoD has been maturing development of modeling & simulation interoperability by making contractors adhere to High Level Architecture (HLA) so they can properly analyze these systems before deploying them. HLA basically provides a lot of the same data object registration, distribution, and interfaces that older tech like CORBA does, with extra simulation concepts.
These technologies are being commercialized under the buzzwords "Nework Centric Operations" (NCO) and "Network Enabled Operations" (NEO). Advocates usually point to well networked operations like Wal-mart, UPS, et al. as poster children for what could be done (automatic restocking, package tracking, load balancing & route optimization, etc.) with enough NEO infrastructure. A lot of the interchange standards (including C4ISR) are getting established through bodies like the OMG. Other than the interchange standards, there's not all that much new tech involved... maybe RFIDs and various other networking tech (grid/mesh networks, strong encryption/authentication, mobile IP, etc.). Most if it just involves looking at technology that already exists and figuring out how to piece it together to actually do something worthwhile.
Disclaimer: I work for one of the gov't contractors throwing all these buzzwords around.
Project Oxygen is much closer to achieving the article's goals, at least in terms of cutsy demos(see the video clips at the preceding link). The Oxygen project's goals are a bit different from the article author's goals. Oxygen is more concerned with consumer/business office environments than the article's emphasis on an automotive designer's needs.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Choose your poison:
Email, nntp,IM, xmlblaster, Jabber, MQSseries, SonicMQ, SwiftMQ, Softwired iBus, Jiiva RapidMQ, ICM etc etc etc etc...
What we need to do is write *more* message systems. In fact, lets *everyone* do one.
The real problem is standardisation. The situation is a bit like networking protocols before TCP/IP became all pervasive. Each vendor has their own system and are happy to charge you an arm and a leg to connect it up to everything. You then have the same problem with information definitions and formatting but XML and things schemes rosettanet are gradually solving that one.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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"
Sheesh, that's ALL we need. It's as if web browser cookies aren't enough. Oh, what's this thing called a "Lobstergram"? Went to look it up on google, went to the website, and the next day I find an email from the lobstergram people with some "special offer". I swear that businesses feel entitled to spamming you in the name of doing good business (from their POV of course).
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
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.
It's almost an anti-security device, too. If a French-speaker has their card stolen by an English-speaker, it the ATM only prompted in French, that would be at least a little bit of a deterrent for illicit use, wouldn't it be?
It's crazy to talk about a universally connected web of smart data when the individual machines are, even after years of evolution, so profoundly stupid.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
John McCarthy came up with the same idea (and invented a better XML before anyone had even heard of SGML) 30 years ago.
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
My microapps teacher told me a story of his grandfather refusing to use the phone. He said, "Why would I ever talk into a peice of plastic. If I want to talk to somebody, I'll go down the street and talk to them." While some people today may be concerned about big brother, new generations are more open to technology. I think that someday, tomorrow's kids will not have a problem with technology controlling their lives because they will be brought up in a world where technology is already doing so.