Information is like Beauty
March 24th, 2008
Information is like beauty, in that it is in the eye of the beholder. The same piece of data may have different value or meaning to different people who view it or when viewed in relation to other data. While HDS is in the business of providing infrastructure to store, access, and preserve data there are a whole lot of other challenges around finding and interpreting the data that we store.
Last week I had the pleasure to introduce an exciting panel of speakers at the InfoLab/Hitachi workshop that was sponsored by the Stanford Computer Forum and Hitachi Ltd. The speakers included:
Paul Strong, Distinguished Research Scientist, eBay Research Labs
“Why Enterprise Management Is All About Relationships And Not Things”
Brewster Kahle, Director and Co-Founder, Internet Archive
“Universal Access to All Human Knowledge”
Stewart Butterfield, Co-Founder of Flickr
“Kissing Clouds”
Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research,
“ New Sciences for a New Web”
Hector Garcia-Molina, Stanford University Computer Scientist
Moderator for the Panel
As you might surmise from the names of the speakers and the titles of their presentations, the afternoon was centered on finding and extracting information out of the avalanche of data that we are storing.
Paul Strong talked about the infrastructure that is required to support the massive transaction requirements at eBay and his research into the Semantic Web.
Brewster Kahle who has founded several companies and whose IP is used by 90% of web browsers today talked about his vision and his progress toward providing universal access to all human knowledge through his non profit Internet archive. He is attempting to create the library of Alexandria on the web and make it available to all. After his talk, a person with the typical dot.com mentality, can up to him and asked him what was the value in his archive.org. He could not understand that the preservation of knowledge that would be available for generations to come was a valid goal.
Stewart Butterfield, talked about trends in the ubiquity of capture devices, and the perception that participation in social networks no longer feels weird. Most humans don’t care about the underlying technology of the “cloud”. Tagging the data becomes important and social networking might be used to refine the tagging of content.
I had to leave before Raghavan’s presentation, but I understand that he talked about searching by intent versus content. Today we search based on key words and popularity of page hits. That may not be a true measure of audience engagement and fulfillment.
The growth in unstructured data is tremendous, and the challenges of storing, retrieving and protecting that data is challenging. New technologies will need to be developed to aggregate and correlate that data in the context of information from the eye of the beholder
The presentations that were given at this InfoLab/Hitachi workshop will be posted at http://infolab.stanford.edu
