by John McDowall
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| Technology Musings by John McDowall |
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Friday, September 06, 2002 Information should be location Independent - Part I DesktopOr the death of C:\ and its sibling /usr/homeOnce a user gets above a few hundred files on their desktop (unless they are very organized), finding files again becomes a major chore. I believe that the problem is that the physical storage of the information is needlessly exposed to the user. We do not think about our information as having a particular location but rather containing a particular set of information. Given the strangle hold on the industry by a few major players, who have no real vested interest in changing status quo we are faced with a problem. OpenOffice and similar projects attempt to unseat the reigning monopoly by emulating the features of the leading desktop office product. You do not catch up with a leader by playing by their rules - you need to change the game and the rules to successfully unseat the leader. Office products have not changed in 10 years - more bells and whistles but they are still the same painful products to use they were 10 years ago and they do not enhance the abilities of the user. What has this to do with location independent information: an opportunity to change the rules and deliver a new way of working with information that will deliver real value to users and differentiate open source office products from the stagnant monopolies of the past. OpenOffice has only a few steps to go to provide the necessary infra-structure for the change - it already saves files as XML. From XML to RDF is a small step. The two more significant steps are to save information through an engine similar to a search engine that will extract contextual information and then what is the interface to ask for information? An interesting example is Kartoo while a little immature is a good example of what a new way of looking at information could be. Several years ago there was a company called Perspecta which had a similar idea, I always thought they had something, I think I now see what... Extending this idea the engine becomes a personal research tool, it knows what you want and can be directed to external resources to find related information, either within the enterprise or outside to other public or private resources. Am I describing the Semantic Web, a new Office suite, or Mozilla with a rich set of plugins; only time will tell but I know this will come... posted by John McDowall | 9:13 PM Information should be location independentWe have coupled location too tightly with information, i.e. if saving a file requires saving it to a location not to a context. The context is how we think about the information not about some abstract location imposed by an operating system. Currently we are confusing how information is saved and its context. What is missing is the layer of abstraction that separates the physical storage from the contextual information about the file. As information has been tightly coupled to its location so user interfaces have propagated this error. Some of the problem has been lack of processing power to allow the abstraction to be implemented. This is only a partial reason as Apple showed with the Macintosh. At that time creating a graphical user interface used a substantial part of the available computing resources, but the result was such a major leap in usability people were willing to have less processing power available. One the first companies to talk about the idea of location independent information was Tibco, one of the basic concepts for the information bus was that users of the bus just requested information, they were not required to know its location just its context, similarly for putting information onto the bus. This simplicity has been lost, mainly ((IMHO) because we are assuming that exposing the file system is a fundamental building block rather than a mistake. The web and now the semantic web is a sincere attempt to transform this problem and create a new way of looking at information. The major step that needs to be taken is when the interface into information becomes similar to the concept of the information bus, i.e. I save it to the bus and request it from the not by its location but by the information context. A part of the context should be how transactional interactions should be and the level of security (also perhaps the certified identity of the creator - the value of the information is in many ways directly proportional to the level of trust and respect the consumer has for the producer.). I have started two additional notes on what and how to attack this problem on both the desktop and the enterprise - stay tuned posted by John McDowall | 8:54 PM |
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