Over the past few decades, the amount of information available and the speed of its delivery have been expanding exponentially. Today, information is truly at our fingertips – a lot of information. Often it’s more than we actually need, or want, or can handle. If we are looking for an update on today’s news, information on a competitor’s products, exact shipping status of a product, or the best deal on a flight to New York, it is only a click of a button away. And more information arrives to us every day: Our email mailbox gets filled with business and personal messages mixed with promotions, merchant updates, a variety of newsletters and more, all vying for our attention. Add an online messenger providing us instantly with short notes, shared files and photos. And finally there is information created by us - ranging from simple letters and memos to complex spreadsheets and graphic files. A lot of this information ends up stored on our computers. The question is, how should one manage today’s information glut?
The customer needs are genuine. We can store much more information than we can easily manage. Although laptops are now measured in gigabytes, and servers in terabytes, a more appropriate unit would be “haystacks”. Corporations complain that their executives spend much more time finding various needles of information than actually using it. And often, when it is found, the piece of information has so little context that it lacks real value. Was memo6.txt the final version, or is there a memo7 somewhere that comes to different conclusions? Was the author a VP or a new employee who was just hired? When was it written? Was it reviewed?
Intelligent storage systems can address these problems. Each item stored would also have with it its properties and its relationship to other items. For example, properties of a memo could include its date and its review level. It could be related under the “author” relation to a person item, whose properties could include “job title”, and it could be related under the “superseded by” relation to the next version, if there is one. Multimedia items such as audio and video clips can have properties and relations in the same way as text items. This data-about-the-data – or metadata – would make it easier to find the desired information and easier to establish its context. Metadata-related functions embedded in the operating system or an intelligent filestore layer just above it could bring some order into our information-overflowing computers, and make finding relevant information easier and faster. If implemented properly, they would also improve interoperability between information management applications, and reduce development costs.
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