Hey Windell, I would love to help contribute if I could to your personal project of linking mobile to desktop filesystems. If you make it maybe a GIT respository I'd love to contribute as much as I can. I'm sure that there are plenty of people here that would also love to contribute :D
I would help out with a practical artificial intelligence like system that has the functionality of Jarvis or HAL, I think thats a really useful project all I would need is access to a GIT Subversion or another form of source control or even just a document of what needs to be done.
I would love to help, if you guys are serious about getting it started :D
I would be all for it starting the next week I could setup an IRC and server for GIT Repository and we can outline the project and get started with small steps :D
Sounds good.
I have no idea whats going on, but i can help if you want.
i would be glad to help as well
ok, I'll post when I have a good basis setup for the idea of the project. I'm aiming to be completely open source but I do want to establish a small team that would work together. You can email me and I'll let you know the details of the project on a further extent. :D
Sorry I’m a bit alter to the party.
I can attempt to explain better (perhaps worse) the overall concept. There are some (very general, and not hard and fast) rules with a system like this:
- This is mainly about organizing and relating data.
- It should not interfere with how you “get at” the data.
- With my data, I don’t want to think about it. Any effort beyond the minimal effort is too much effort. One need not be OCD to have OCD levels of organization.
- The semantics/relations of the data mostly comes from the data itself, and minimal external input (except perhaps seeding efforts).
- The Semantic Web (Web 3.0), and concepts, is related to this but we have a less idealistic idea of implementation.
Overall, conceptually:
We as human beings need the ability to dump files into our systems and let the computers do the work of organizing for us. The first version of this will probably only be personal files but I could see it quickly expand to work files as well. In my mind it is one of the key pieces of having an actually useful “digital assistant” software someday.
In terms of search, I see Google becoming a ‘recipe’ engine. We as human beings are getting to the point where we don’t remember anything except the magic words to put into Google. That is okay, but I want my “memories” from Google to be less transient and more immutable. I need to be able to snapshot and organize the result for the future. This leads me back to the “personal google” or “personal graph search” I have mentioned before.
The system should be implemented such that it “feels natural” for searching and organizing personal data, paperwork, effects, movies, music, games, files, etc. that you have collected (even offline stuff – just to browse). The system should be smart enough to generally not return irrelevant data and should automatically organize new data added to it.
What I have right now is really just a program that sits on top of a file system (yay hierarchy. Bleh!) and organizes things it sees into things that make it easy for me to find later. The hierarchy is somewhat artificial, and somewhat my doing. In the hierarchy (among other things) I have games (steam, dos, emu), documents (personal, work), pictures (vacation, random, etc), etc. My email system is also organized such that I have saved searches for common things I want to do that effectively re-arranges and groups my email to be project based, point in time, or topical. At the end of the day, this is not super sophisticated. I can search for Vacation photos from last year, or all photos taken in August last year, or photos that I emailed last year, etc. This is really just to give you an idea – the system need not be limited.
To start to think about this the right way, you should know your history. What I mean by that is you should know how we got here when looking at the little bits and pieces that will go into this. For example: Databases, in general. Before computers were fast enough to deal with the relational database model in the late 1980s, hierarchal databases were all the rage. “Everything” fit neatly into a hierarchy. Relational came along, and it is still pretty well in vogue except for places where people are bolting things together (e.g. object-oriented relational where you have objects that are related and objects may or may not decompose into two or more related tables). Then everyone starts talking about The Graphs and nodes on the graph and the foreign keys for how things are related there.
To better explain (hopefully), point by point
For organizing and relating the data – the level of bureaucracy the average citizen has to deal with has gone to epic proportions. Companies capitalize on people not doing their homework and paperwork all the time. It should not be us vs. their computers (which we will never win) it should be our computers vs. their computers. I should have on hand every agreement I’ve ever signed for every service, copies of every bill, amounts of every bill, and all relations. With some effort, the software can put these things together for us. Our own desktop/home computer should house the info, but the information should be fetchable from our phone as well. I have no desire to use 50 apps, and I don’t want to lose control of the information I have. The way I see to implement this is to make it run on top of a file system so you can still ‘get at’ the data (files) and meta data (xml files, mainly, and some searchable/text lookup databases in mysql). I could see this eventually being implemented on top of Dropbox or Google drive. Indeed this is how “Keep” has been implemented which might assuage fears Google will someday turn off Keep. This is the short concept for 1+2.
For point 3, right now, I sort of have the structure that works for me. I don’t have to do much beyond just putting the files in the right place. With my email, though, I don’t even have to do that. It is done for me because “past” emails already got all the attention they needed and the system “learned”. When Lamar Bob Smith is not associated with Project Q anymore and is now on Project X, I only need to tell the system once. (I do have to do two searches when it is “show me emails about project X” and “show me files to do with Project X” which kind of sucks.)
Four and Five are related. Tim Berners-Lee believes that Web 3.0, the semantic web, will happen when everyone standardizes on the same data format. At that point it really can be computers talking to computers. But things are still happening in the computer-to-human interface, and there is no incentive (by default) for people to build apps that other apps can talk to. It makes business sense for Twitter, Google, etc. to offer up an API for these kinds of interfaces.. but as we have seen with twitter, they also take away that API functionality when it hurts their business case. I think he’s also thinking of stuff like RSS where it is a reasonable standard and simplified data format – not really an api – that data is stored in and so it can be consumed however. Not to totally gloss over this -- we are seeing some things like address and phone number microformats to make click-to-dial from any device easier.. but these microformats came at a time when a lot of mobile browsers were using things like regular expressions to detect phone numbers (with or without microformats).
The reality is that this app is a bit of a unicorn until semantic web stuff happens. The alternative is that this app has got to be able to interface with gmail, outlook, google drive, dropbox, itunes, foobar2000, and basically every popular app ever created in order to 1) get data out and 2) put data in.
A “little bit” of AI running on top of all this would do wonders.
Ultimately, the risk is too great to move all one’s information to the cloud without some form of encryption or other protection. Early versions, however, may run on something like Google Drive or Dropbox just to make file system distribution easy.
One other random fleeting thought -- In terms of saving a “snapshot” of a website or other “point in time” relations, Microsoft OneNote does this pretty well. It is useful in this regard… It may be the case that Bill Gates (I understand he had a big role in developing the concepts in OneNote?) is on this same track but is starting from a ‘let’s organize a project’ starting point rather than ‘let’s organize everything’ as we are.
Rambletron Off.
Tl;dr: man seeks digital unicorn for fun and profit.
As one who only read the Tl;dr SIGN ME UP!
Sweet, well I'd love to pick your brain if you don't mind. I'd love to help In any way possible. I have a few comps just laying around and the ability to create possibly a small Linux based platform for Databasing this all. You can email me.
I never really comprehended what you were trying to do since the only instance in which I have heard anyone speak about it prior to this was in some videos I watched. Now that I read and do comprehend your intentions my mind is blown, I have mind diarrhea. I have nothing to really contribute I just wanted to wish you the best of luck.
So in a sense, like the Apple Appstore, without the annoying limitations. (And store part obviously.) I will keep your unicorn with me until you finish. Good luck guys.
So, I don't know exactly where you got the idea of Appstore? Or just how the appstore works. The idea is to organize data and access it efficiently.
I don't know, either of us could be mistaken.