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The Semantic World - properties and methods for the r.w.

There’s a number of trends in technology that have the potential to come together and enable some truly radical changes in our day to day lives. I’d throw out RFID, location-aware devices, and pervasive wifi as primary examples. What I’ve really been hunting for, however, its a way to bring it all together - essentially a small, location-aware RFID-to-WiFi gateway.

Consider the following scenario:

You walk into a meeting room. Your IM presence flips to “busy,” your cellphone switches to silent and direct-to-voicemail, and friends/family/co-workers with access to your schedule can see that you made it to the meeting and how long you’ll be there. When you leave the meeting room, everything flips back, except IM status which flips to “on the road.” You get into a cab, get back to your office, and get out of the cab - payment is automatic. You finally make it back to your desk, at which point IM status changes to available, your phone calls route to your desk phone, and your PC logs itself back in.

Essentially, your identity is projected in a cloud around you (”extended identity”), and it can affect “things” around you, and be affected in turn - i.e.: the act of entering or leaving an area affects you; the act of leaving a cab with which you have a payment agreement affects the cab (it gets paid).

How this is enabled is by applying a software methodology to the larger world - creating a semantic world where a meeting room knows that its a meeting room, a taxicab knows that its a cab and can ask for payment, and your extended identity knows how (generally) to handle interactions that it encounters on your behalf. Each of these “realworld objects” has properties and methods associated with it to enable transactions. There two bits to this:

1. Semantic Infrastructure: For the meeting room above, I’d see the doorway as the semantic infrastructure bit - the frame would have either embedded RFID or Bluetooth infrastrucutre to communicate with the extended identities that pass through it.
2. Extended Identity Profile: A means of projecting and managing your extended identity; your profile would reside online, projected and accessed locally via a smartcard, or cellphone (Bluetooth again).

Anyway - bits and peices of this exist already - cars that don’t need keys, office-access smartcards, etc. But they’re far from pervasive, and built on a frustratingly fragmented infrastructure that doesn’t connect anything to anything else. Getting the technology more widely deployed will require a cheap, open, easily programmable, extensible, and connected device - something akin to the Sun SPOT. Stitching it all together into a useable, single-point-of-access “real world user profile” will require some serious software infrastructure; the company that positions itself to provide that will be 10 steps ahead of the curve.

</end nerdgasm>

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