About Here Me Now . Info

What

In a nutshell, it's all about identity. Ours. And our data.

The genesis of the name lies in a realisation I had that the logical extension of ad hoc tagging would be in semi-structured tagging of all data. Ad hoc tagging is that found in systems such as Flickr and del.icio.us. It simply consists of keywords chosen by the tagger, and is a way to provide some Info about the content or context of the data being tagged. Tags are a form of meta-data - data about other data.

The received wisdom about human-authored metadata is that in general, metadata is going to be: inaccurate, out of date, expensive to produce, or used to try to spam information retrieval systems. There are some rare exceptions to this rule (think library catalogues). However, web search engines basically ignore nearly all metadata associated with web pages, because of these reasons. In fact, the only metadata that will generally be trusted is that which is computer-created. For example, the last modified date on a file.

Increasingly, large amounts of the data that we produce (and make available to others) will be captured through devices that can reliably produce metadata. Mobile phones, digital cameras, PDAs, tablets are our primary tools for this at present. Observing the convergence of these devices, or at least, aspects of the technology (e.g. it's become much harder to buy a mobile phone without a camera in the last year), I anticipate that in a very short time, these tools will record metadata across at least three axes.

Where

Where was that photo of the sunset taken? Which stadium was that rock concert performed at?

Geo-location through GPS is the sleeping giant of metadata production. At present, its use is restricted due to the relatively high cost of an individual receiver (at least, compared to the cost of a digital camera lens). But if I could have geo-location tagging built into the recording of my photos, it would immediately provide incredible extra value. Naturally enough, various people have shown how to do this in ad hoc ways, but it will require an automated solution to make it commonplace. Google Earth and MSN Virtual Earth, together with the local search with integrated mapping offered by MSN, Google and Yahoo, are demonstrating how much better it is to correlate data with our position in space.

Identity on the geo-location axis is denoted by the place Here. I use identity here in a loosely mathematical sense.

In addition to Cartesian grid coordinates, location can be described relative to other known locations - e.g. north of ..., above the ..., near my ..., between ... and ....

Who

Who authored that article on metadata? Who took that photo of elephants?

The twin trends of micro-identification (think RFID and IPv6) and ubiquitous connection to the Internet through wireless communications means that our tools will be uniquely addressable and connected.

The notions of assigning our human selves a digital identifier are fraught, but receiving considerable attention, and involve even more complex issues of trust than for fully digital entities. As usual, there are many defacto mechanisms which may be used in different contexts. For example, I most frequently identify people by the homepage of their blog (if they have one). And people can make reference to me through my blog.

Of course, we sometimes lay claim to our data by associating it with some property we own, such as our blog, our Flickr site, or more traditionally writing our name as one of the list of authors. In future, ways to more directly tie identity to the data will become ubiquitous I suspect.

Identity (mathematical) on the identity (metaphysical) axis is denoted by the entity Me.

When

When was that concert recorded? When was that video of my baby taken - was it his birthday?

Many devices (think digitial cameras) already tag data with timestamps highly effectively - provided we can navigate the interface to setting the time correctly. In the future, through Internet connections, it will be possible for devices to keep themselves in sync with Coordinated Universal Time wherever they are. There are probably already applications for Flickr that ferret out all the photos taken on a particular day.

Identity for the date-stamp axis is denoted by the time Now.

In addition to standards such as ISO 8601, time (like space) can be relative to other know times - e.g. before the ..., after the ..., around my ....

Why

Why is any of this useful?

My hypothesis is that as these metadata axes become increasingly common in our data, we may wish to modify some of it selectively (e.g. we wish to associate our digital camera's identity directly with our own digital identity to lay claim to photos), and we may wish to retrieve data based on these criteria. Lastly, there will be applications that emerge to mine the (meta)data and repurpose it.

The key to making use of it all will be to allow sloppy and human readable access to the metadata itself and any querying interfaces. Thus the default identity position - here, me, now - becomes essential.