I’d like to say well done to Cennydd Bowles for highlighting the similarity between Bill Gates recent claims of touch-screen utopia and the early 1990’s short-film Starfire. His explanations are available through his blog post “Old interfaces die hard“.
In fact, if you do watch the Starfire short film, you’ll also notice that there is some advanced search going on in the meeting room near the end. I feel that search like this has started to appear already, I will give you my reason:
More and more people are getting a grip on the Web of Data (aka Data Web), which are virtual objects connected by labeled links (aka Linked Data). These virtual objects are stored in spaces (aka Data Spaces) which in themselves have meaning. Now, using a powerful query language (such as SPARQL) you can quite easily query through virtual time and space to find exactly what you need… just like in the short film.
There is obviously one problem and thats simplicity. SPARQL is available now, and it does work… however in order for the average user to use it, its going to have to be manipulatable in a user-friendly way. At OpenLink we have got something called iSPARQL, which allows you to manipulate SPARQL graphically, making things a lot more user friendly.
Touch screen is just a small part of the big picture provided by the Starfire film.
Links
- iSPARQL demo through Myopenlink.net
Technorati Tags: touchscreen, linkeddata, sparql, search, starfire
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