Organic Data

I work in a corner of the software industry where business management applications have evolved from their rudimentary 1980's origins and where at the same time, the principles of how people should use those applications, particularly in the area of data disciplines, have also evolved.

For example, we learned quite early on that the pre-school data principle of preceeding zeroes was important because a record coding sequence of 1, 2, 3, 4 - 99999 doesn't sort well compared with a sequence like 0000001, 00000002, 00000003 and so on. And also early on, we devised methods for combining different coding analyses into single codes, like AS012003UK is really AS-01-2003-UK.

Things have moved on considerably since then, of course, but increasingly data appears to be playing a more important and prominent role in our everyday non-working lives. Like our mobile phone address books, do you use forename/ forename, surname / surname, forename or just non-intelligible anarchy? (fyi I'm 100% surname,forename apart from family members.)

What about our MP3 collections or the thousands of digital photgraphs that occupy our hard disks? - again fyi I use a 2003-10-20 format for photo subfolder names.

Being vaguely of a data persuasion, I've studiously codified my most of my personal digital stuff - but not all of it - to be accessible in as sensible a way as possible to me, to aid searching or just better organised archiving.

This is something that's not inherently easy to do in Windows as there's no inbuilt data management or indexing at an operating or filesystem level, so you have to devise your own coding structures if you want them, relying mostly upon sorting by filename and date to get you by. A future version of Windows is supposed to have a proper indexing filing system built in and that may help a little, but it's 3-4 years away it'll be a chargeable upgrade so this won't do anything to help us organise our digital stuff in the short term.

Is random, badly structured data actually a good thing in an organic, gritty sort of way or is the inexorable slide into immaculate uniformity an inevitable and necessary consequence of achieving a truly connected and digital life?

But in one sense, perfect and structured uniformity seems to be somewhat at odds with the organic like forms that can appear when you graphically represent things like interconnected FOAF profiles, for example but having said that, I suppose that the uniformity found in phenomena like the Fibonacci Sequence and the Mandelbrot Set can take on a lifelike form too.

Social Network Testing & The Semantic We

This place is getting more like Gattaca every day. I was doing some thinking in the car this week - I've been in the car a lot this week - about

FOAF profiles and the whole Six Degrees of Separation thing, and I wondered if in the not too distant future, we might be supplementing our resumes and c.v.'s with social profiles giving details of the layers and the strengths of our social and professional network connections, affording would-be employers the chance to overlay and match our network profiles against their model candidate network profile like a relationship or social form of psychometric testing. (I wonder what having RageBoy in your social network would throw up in such a test?...)

Social Networking, a discreet pastime in itself for some, surely must be more complex than simply being about collecting basic vanilla connections and relationships. From casually flitting about networking sites the other day, I found comments from professional social networkers such as "My mission is to meet 1,500 people this year, last year I only met 1,200" and this seems like a very clinical approach where the only important measure is the number of people you add to your network and not what you add to it. For some it's evidently just a numbers game, but surely it must be less linear than this?

Google uses their PageRank method to sort and order links so that the more hyperlinks that point to a specific site, the higher the rank value of that site and the closer to the top it floats in Google's search indexes.

Put this into the context of social networking and FOAF, and I suspect that before long we'll be ranking individuals and their connections in this way too, by calculating their social value in terms of the number of people they 'know' and weighting their links accordingly or, more interestingly, by attibuting a value to the life contribution they make in other ways, e.g. applying a value multiplier if you've written a book or a software program or some other kind of social contribution or identifier like race, linguistic skills, parenting skills or information that may be put to more sinister uses; your biological make-up or your genetic profile.

On that last point, I suppose that if we're completely serious about our social networking - pure social networking - then there's no point in having someone in your social network who's going to die young from heart disease through lack of exercise or smoking habit, after all what use would they be to us in the long run?

Increasingly I get a sense that the early murmurs and machinations of the Semantic Web are creeping progressively over our world and infesting it like some form of nano-technology-esque meta sludge, gradually and imperceptibly pushing us to revaluate and logically re-organise every aspect of our lives in preparation for the day when we are entirely depicted and rendered in a database somewhere or indeed, everywhere on the Web.

Best Practice Software Cont'd...

I was thinking about that previous Viagra For Business post this morning whilst averaging about 20mph on the M1 motorway heading to yet another monthly board meeting where I'd go on to delicately negotiate the terms of my not being fired for another month, and I thought to myself; how is the concept of building best practice business processes and models into software applications any different - in conceptual terms -from building a spell checker into a word processor? No different really, I replied in a familiar tone.

More complex, certainly, but the concept for guiding users in certain, pre-defined and rule based directions seems to have hit a brick wall at spelling and grammar checking. Or am missing other examples of this?

PS. I wish Blogger would help me become a better blogger by giving me some editorial feedback before I post.