::scr FreeForm Filesystem

[Simon Wistow]

Again, an extension of something I've been thinking about for a while
... kind of an extension of db file systems, desktop dipsy and the like.

In fact we've pretty much harped on about it before but I've gone a bit
further so.

As previously mentioned I have some code lying around that implements a
filesystem under Linux[0]. When you look at it normally it looks like a
directory full of Mbox files (Mbox being the standard way of storing
emails - each Mbox file represents one folder).

Except that what's actually running it is a Database - all mail gets
stored in the database with each of the fields neatly seperated out and
the folders are defined as queries.

  http://thegestalt.org/scr/arch/2002-February/000353.html

for previous rantings.

Anyway, I've also recently been playing round with Eric Brill's
Rule Based Parts of speech tagger.

 http://london.pm.org/pipermail/bots/2002-April/000064.html

and my first thought was to have something that watched an irc channel
or something and tagged all the text going through it plus went and
examined all the urls that went past (oh for a semantic web) in the same
way and built up a knowledge base for you to query.

Then I started thinking that it would be great to have this working on
all my email. All that knowledge (it'd be a grade A genius when it came
to answering the question 'do you want to go to the pub?') sotred in a
easily parseable form ...

Then I was looking at Lifestreams again 

  http://www.scopeware.com/
and
  http://www.cs.yale.edu/Linda/lifehype/life.html

and started thinking ... why not organise *all* your data like this ...
whack it in a database somewhere, queryable by an interface and then run
some agent over it and let it infer a whole load of knowledge. 

I'll put down the crack pipe now.

Simon

http://us.imdb.com/Quotes?0103064

The Terminator : The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes
on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic
defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes
self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try
to pull the plug.
Sarah Connor: And Skynet fights back. 


[0] Filesystems under *nix don't work like they do under Windows or Mac.
Essentially they can be mounted anywhere in your directory tree so that
anyfolder can be a new filesystem. And filesystems can be written to do
pretty much anything.

 
-- 
: omnipotence for dummies