Dataspace Boomlet
December 30, 2008
First, the UK moved toward pervasive monitoring. You can read about it here. Australia made some moves in a similar direction which you can read about here. Now The Hindu reports “Crime Scene Investigation Now to Function with Broadband.” You can read this story about POLNET here. For me the most interesting comment in the article was:
Police stations across the country will feed and upload video and still footage of the crime spot on POLNET which will then be transmitted to the Central server in Delhi and can be accessed by authorized experts. Such analysis would help in understanding the modus operandi of criminals and terrorists and prepare a strategy to tackle the same.
These systems are baby steps toward nation state dataspaces. Unlike a dataspace, the metadata available to investigators becomes richer. I have no position about the policies these nation states are implementing. What’s important to me are these issues:
- The idea of a dataspace, not a database, is clearly gaining traction. Obviously traditional databases cannot delivering the value that their licensees desire.
- The dataspace analyses will place considerable strain on the nation states’ data processing ability. The jam regarding the Bush White House digital data is an example of the data management burden that will become a major issue in 2009.
- The company best positioned to provide cloud based processing of these data is, in my opinion, Google. If there is a dip in advertising, the GOOG can contact certain countries with an offer to use Google’s proprietary data management systems for a fee. The pricing model can be a variant of the Clearwell Systems’ approach; that is, by the gigabyte.
I know that most people are blissfully unaware of the dataspace technology. I can point you to the for fee report Sue Feldman and I wrote in September 2008. I cannot reproduce that document IDC Number 213562 here. Some dataspace information appears in my Gilbane Report Beyond Search which is available here. In my view from my hollow in rural Kentucky, there will be some activity in the dataspace sector in 2009.
Stephen Arnold, December 30, 2008
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One Response to “Dataspace Boomlet”
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National dataspaces would be one particular application of the dataspace concept but absolutely by no means the only one. But don’t focus only on “nation state dataspaces.” There’s a lot of power to concept, the idea that you can create a topical information domain that expansively includes information from disparate sources without forcing schema conformity. XML and Semantic Web technologies can be of great use here.
So happens that I wrote about this stuff in 2006 — http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=184429656 — and had a conversation just this last week with Berkeley researcher Mike Franklin, who says ‘the idea has been picking up some momentum in the research community – one of my favorite examples of the latter is that the British National Conference on Databases next year has the theme “Dataspace – the final frontier.”‘