Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

September 27, 2013

Meet Node-RED…

Filed under: Networks,Organic Programming,Programming — Patrick Durusau @ 3:09 pm

Meet Node-RED, an IBM project that fulfills the internet of things’ missing link by Stacey Higginbotham.

From the post:

If you play around with enough connected devices or hang out with enough people thinking about what it means to have 200 connected gizmos in your home, eventually you get to a pretty big elephant in the room: How the heck are you going to connect all this stuff? To a hub? To the internet? To each other?

It’s one thing to set a program to automate your lights/thermostat/whatever to go to a specific setting when you hit a button/lock your door/exit your home’s Wi-Fi network, but it’s quite another to have a truly intuitive and contextual experience in a connected home if you have to manually program it using IFTTT or a series of apps. Imagine if instead of popping a couple Hue Light Bulbs into your bedroom lamp, you bought home 30 or 40 for your entire home. That’s a lot of adding and setting preferences.

Organic programming: Just let it go

If you take this out of the residential setting and into a factory or office it’s magnified and even more daunting because of a variety of potential administrative tasks and permissions required. Luckily, there are several people thinking about this problem. Mike Kuniavsky, a principal in the innovation services group at PARC, first introduced me to this concept back in February and will likely touch on this in a few weeks at our Mobilize conference next month. He likens it to a more organic way of programming.

The basic idea is to program the internet of things much like you play a Sims-style video game — you set things up to perform in a way you think will work and then see what happens. Instead of programming an action, you’re programming behaviors and trends in a device or class of devices. Then you put them together, give them a direction and they figure out how to get there.

Over at IBM, a few engineers are actually building something that might be helpful in implementing such systems. It’s called node-RED and it’s a way to interject a layer of behaviors for devices using a visual interface. It’s built on top of node.js and is available over on github.

If you have ever seen the Eureka episode H.O.U.S.E. Rules, you will have serious doubts about the wisdom of “…then see what happens” with regard to your house. 😉

I wonder if this will be something truly different, like organic computing or a continuation of well known trends.

Early computers were programmed using switches but quickly migrated to assembler, but few write assembler now and those chores are done by compilers.

Some future compiler may accept examples of the “same” subject and decide on the most effective way to search and collate all the data for a given subject.

That will require a robust understanding of subject identity on the part of the compiler writers.

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