by ChrisCook
Fri Mar 29th, 2013 at 11:55:11 AM EST
Saving data donkeys in quicksand is an interesting BBC article in relation to the phenomenon of data tagging.
A friend of mine worked out the importance of generic subjective tagging for messaging (of all types) about 10 years ago, but could never engage with anyone to develop the resulting applications he also developed. Among other things, these would essentially finish off what's left of the existing business model of advertisers, and in turn mean that the likes of Google and Facebook would have to move on from their existing business models.
But because of the voracious and ruthless nature of the corporate players involved and the pernicious regime of IP rights and law, the concepts were not implemented, although the elements which he had far-sightedly analysed are now beginning to emerge.
From that perspective and experience, I think that where tagging will lead is to a simple 'personal operating system' resident on personal devices, and which will connect - with the minimum of complex code - directly to decentralised/distributed data-bases.
The only central assets would be servers which resolve:
(a) basic personal identity to a market/enterprise/group identity ; and
(b) machine identity to market identity ie what I have for years termed a 'Dot Market' model with a market-specific domain such as Dot Oil, or Dot Gas.
This raises the Big Brother issue of who can be trusted with such servers, and maybe the former might be domiciled in (say) Iceland, and the latter in (say) Switzerland.
Individuals only have one basic personal ID, but they may potentially have thousands of market-specific, enterprise-specific and group-specific IDs.
Their basic personal ID is only physically located in one place at one time, which adds in the possibility of generic geo-authentication of transactions - ie mapping mobile device locations to static machine locations. This brings another Big Brother issue of who can be trusted with that data.
Attempting to create a Semantic Web on an object-oriented machine-centric basis has always seemed to me to be a dead end, where increasingly sophisticated algorithms have attempted to derive meaning from data objects by reference to experience. But tagging is different and subjective or subject-oriented, because only you know what you mean, and will tag using language as you see fit.
I believe that we are in a transition from a complex, centralised, fragile, machine-centric Web 2.0 to a simple, decentralised, resilient, people-centric Web 3.0.
