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April 30, 2004

Context as an Integration Driver

I just read a white paper at the Radiant Logic Web site on context. The article contends that hierarchical relationships provide context and that one of the primary drivers for integration on the business side is recovering context. As an example, when I combine customer service and customer billing systems, I gain more context surrounding any individual customer and the understanding I gain from that is what makes the integration worthwhile. The article hums right along and makes some interesting points until it gets to the "Context from a technical perspective" section and then is feels like the author lost interest and posted it before it was done. I wish that weren't so---I was anxious to read it.

02:44 PM | Recommend This | Print This

Ravenous RSS Readers

A Wired magazine article talks about the problems with bandwidth comsumed by RSS. Overall, I think the article is a little shallow, only getting to the interesting solutions in the last three paragraphs. There are plenty of interesting solutions to be developed and as Dave Winer says at the end of the article, once its in someone's economic interest to solve them, they'll get solved.

11:09 AM | Recommend This | Print This

Cowster Moves Closer to Reality

WYTrax cattle tracking program runs on a Palm and uses a bluetooth enabled RFID reader to inventory the herd and return information about each cow.
Cowster is the nickname I've given to the idea of using Web services to build a distributed cattle tracking system. Now a Wyoming company has move us one step closer to reality by using Bluetooth, RFID, and PDAs to let ranchers keep track of vital information about each member of the heard and pull it up with the wave of a wand.

A article on News of the Weird explains it pretty well (warning scroll down to read the page). Cowster would take this one step further and create datastores with herd genealogies at private hosting services (perhaps associated with coops). A standard would allow a particular cows genealogy and heard associations to be traced through this centralized system. The goal is to keep the data private and under the control of its owners unless it needs to be queried to prevent the outbreak of some disease.

10:39 AM | Recommend This | Print This