Islands of information
For some years now I’ve viewed the practice of users storing data files in directories on local hard disks or even servers as completely anachronistic. In fact I think of it much the same way as I think of data held on a floppy disk – I know it’s there but getting at it is so hard it might as well not be.
To me, all this data is isolated in islands of information and needs to be rescued by being stored in a different way.
What I want is for all information to be:
- Searchable
- Categorised, with multiple categorisations
- Catalogued. In other words described in a table of contents
- Versioned
- Accessible by anywhere on the net in a controlled way
and that is not done by current operating systems. So, for that reason I think we need to see a shift towards all data being stored in specialist applications that provide these functions. Yes, I realise that desktop search has dealt with the searching issues, but it still doesn’t tackle my other points.
The product I prefer for this at the moment is Lotus Notes, but the moment something better comes along, I’ll switch. For example if there was an Internet based app that combined webdav, caldav, email, opendoc format files and so on then that might do it.
The final thing to note is that in any organistion the highly structured information is already stored in a specialist application, called a database. All I’m talking about is taking the same approach to loosely structured information, which is actually a first step in a knowledge managememt strategy.
I totally agree with the spirit of this article. However, I am convinced that use of Lotus notes is going to have exactly the opposite effect on the storage of information. Lotus notes is so bad at what it does that it actively discourages users from storing and sharing their information. To achieve what you want the infrastructure must be transparent to the user in the same way that the filesystem is.
I agree with John – mostly, anyway. The problem isn’t so much that Notes is “bad at what it does” (though few would argue that it’s brilliant), but that it’s completely incapable of interoperating with anything else. In the rest of the world, with text-based, layered, known, protocols together with swathes of APIs, libraries, open-source implementations, getting two things talking just isn’t hard. In Notes-land it’s all opaque binary blobs, you can do what the designers thought of and that’s it. Yes, it has some scripting ability, but that’s not really enough. The only thing that can talk to Notes is Notes, and that’s why I’d never willingly start a new collection of data inside it.