Everyone has a Graph Store by Danny Ayers.
Try this thought experiment.
For practical purposes we often assume that everyone has a computer, a reasonable Internet connection and a modern Web browser. We know it’s an inaccurate assumption, but it provides conceptual targets for technology in terms of people and environment.
Ok, now add to that list a Graph Store: a flexible database to which information can easily be added, and which can be easily queried. The data can also be easily shared over the Cloud. The data is available for any applications that might want to use it. The database is schemaless, agnostic about what you put in it: the data could be about contacts, descriptions of people & their relationships (i.e. a Social Graph), it could be about places or events, products, technical information, whatever. It can contain private information, it can contain information that you’re happy to share. You control your own store and can let other people access as much or as little of its contents as you like (which they can do easily over the cloud). You can access other people’s store in the same way, according to their preferences. It’s both a Personal Knowledgebase and a Federated Public Knowledgebase.
So, make the assumption: everyone has a Graph Store. Now what do you want to do with yours? What can your friends and colleagues do with theirs? How can you use other peoples information to improve your quality of life, and vice versa? What new tools can be developed to help them take advantage of their stores? How can you get rich quick on this? What other questions are there..?
When I do this thought experiment, all I come up with is Facebook. So I am not very encouraged.
Perhaps Danny is expecting a natural clumping of useful comments and insights. Certainly is possible but then clumpings around Jim Jones and Jimmy Swaggart are also possible.
Or that a process of collective commenting and consideration will lead to useful results. American Idol isn’t strong evidence that mass participation produces good results. Or American election results.
Your thought experiment results may vary so feel free to report them.
Graphs are a great idea. Asking everyone to write down their thoughts in a graph store, not so great.
Computer users have been using a graph store for a long time but it is broken into so many tree-like shards that the graph structure is hard to recognize.
I’m probably like most computer users in that I have related information spread across: my hard-drive folder/file tree, my browser bookmark tree, my facebook messages, one or more email accounts each with their own set of storage folders, maybe a few relational databases at work, a personal notes database (or two), not to mention a set of paper files and a few stacks of saved, bookmarked magazines/books/journals.
Every new information technology adds a new shard but does not replace the earlier ones because there is either no way to migrate the information or it is too much trouble to migrate it. The result is that the graph store between my ears is getting overloaded trying to keep track of where the related, stored information is.
If some smart person in the topic map community could develop an easy way for me to build a map that overlays all this and re-integrates all the tree-like shards back into a graph store that I could search/explore/traverse, it would make my computer life (and probably a lot of other people’s) much easier.
There have already been a few attempts (Deepa Mehta, Chandler, KDE Semantic Desktop) but so far, they either require me to build the structure up-front or go back and tag everything or store everything in a pre-defined place or pre-defined structure. Ideally, I’d like to define where the information is stored and then build a mapping structure on the fly that matches my current interest and let the computer link the map to the information. When my interests change or when I understand something a new way or when a new project comes up, I’d like to adjust the map or create a new one and let the computer adjust the links to the information.
Is that too much to ask?
Comment by clemp — February 27, 2012 @ 11:12 pm