Week 8

Research -

Scouring the library, Web, Athens and every magazine i can put my hands on to get scaffolding for all my ideas.

My Ideas ....

The Big Idea

~ Meta-data ~

The Inspiration;

Breaking Network Logjams by Michelle Effors, Ralf Keotter and Muriel Médard.
Scientific America June 2007

The article talks about the approach used to transmit data in current systems and how these approaches are now a deterring factor to evolving network transportation systems to meet increasing bandwidth and client demands.

Network coding is promoted as a means of addressing the current problem of bottlenecks in routed networks. The TCP / IP network infrastructure is based on switching. The fundamentals were outlined by mathematician Claude E. Shannon; communication channels that have a capacity at a given time and as long as that capacity is not exceeded a reliable transportation mechanism exists.

The system is described to be analogous to roads and the data being transmitted like cars (each bit is a car) travelling over the channels. The authors talk about the POTS - Plain Old Telephone System; where more than one converstation connection could not exist on the same channel at the same time.

The communication technology grew out of the context of two way converstations propagated over the lan line telephone environment. The Internet and communications infrastructure that is currently available fosters multiple messages over multiple channels at the same time. This is quite a different scenario. The idea of dedicating a channel to transmitting one message / packet at a time is the limiting factor.

These researchers pose the idea that instead of treating packets like traffic in terms of cars; that additional logic can be used to increase the throughput of the network without increasing the physical provisions for bandwidth. The idea is based on a device called a "coder" and nodes that know the logic that the coders use to pass data.

The article does a great job of breaking down what would be complex math algorithms into simple examples that are easy to follow. The thing that stood out in the article was the idea that the coders would pass not the messages that were intended to reach the recipient but "evidence about the messages".

This idea of messages about messages or Data about Data .... Data describing Data is a momentous concept (at least I think so) that could change the way we use technology and the way the world works (now that is getting a little ahead of thing - but one can dream).




What it means -

I would like to foundation the software that I am building for my final project around this idea; Meta Data.

Meta Data / Metadata - Data describing a resource not the payload message or content of the resource.

Metadata is more important to computers that to humans. The way I see it ... its what they use to communicate. To a computer a web page is nothing more than a file. However with a description or with some value that a processing agent can use to compare a resource to another resource therin lies some leverage or power.

Even though the article is about transportation and global network communications its based on this thing called Meta Data ... I will delve deeper and try to find other articles or implementations of Meta Data ... and if I find some common ground devise a way to integrate it into the project.

I have some vague thoughts; I know various apps and systems use meta data to communicate and co ordinate thing utilizing DTDs and Schemas. The next step is to find out how.