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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 ;^)
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!
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.