Data, data everywhere.

The availability and manipulation of information is a key factor in the development of society. The modern era has seen significant advances, with technologies such as printing, radio and television providing access to ever increasing amounts of data. The mass adoption of the internet has increased the rate at which data can be disseminated. However, the proliferation of information sources has also made separating the wheat from the chaff increasingly difficult. Apart from the obvious trouble with knowing who to trust, huge quantities of data make it much harder to find what you want. We all use search engines and know that finding what you really want is not as easy as might be assumed.

And the future?

The future is likely to see even greater levels of information integration using the internet as a robust media. The boundary between desktop and web applications is already blurred and I suspect that this trend will continue. Web applications will become less about presenting information and the desktop itself will become increasingly integrated with the web. The kind of service-oriented architectures (SOA) used on the web today will become increasingly common. Our personal computing may take place on a relatively low powered machine leveraging the services provided on much more powerful distributed servers of the type already common on the internet. These machines may store our data remotely and securely, whilst others provide access to databases around the globe.

“Results 1 - 10 of about 424,000,000 for whatever you wanted”.

Unless there are advances in the way we handle all these data, there’ll be a lot of browsing to do. One path is the spread of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) that has so far given us RSS and Atom feeds, without which a blog wouldn’t be a blog. XML is similar to the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) that has been behind websites for years, but it also provides the ability to define custom tags. These can be used to describe the type of data contained between the opening and closing tags. In this manner a single text document can provide information about data and the structure of these data. This is what takes us closer to the goal of having a document that can be read by humans and machines alike. Widespread adoption would give rise to the Semantic Web.

Great where does that get us?

Once data can be fully understood be machines as well as us humans, we can delegate the task of filtering all those hits to our machines. Why not? Not only are they far quicker at this sort of thing, but they don’t get bored doing it! Well… not yet they don’t, but what if we have to use artificial intelligence in order to enable these machines to understand the meaning of that for which they are searching? And you thought you argued with your computer now!