Terry Jones

I’ve been invited to speak at a TTI/Vanguard conference in Atlanta on SMART(ER) DATA on Feb 20/21.

Here’s the abstract.

Representation, Representation, Representation

In this talk I will argue for the importance of information representation. Choice of representation is critical to the design of computational systems. A good choice can simplify or even eliminate problems by reducing or obviating the need for clever algorithms. By making better choices about low-level information representation we can broadly increase the power and flexibility of higher-level applications, and also make them easier to build. In other words, we can more easily make future applications smarter if we are smarter about how we represent the data they manipulate. Despite all this, representation choice is often ignored or taken for granted.

Key trends in our experience with online data are signalled by terms such as mashups, data web, programmable web, read/write web, and collective databases and also by the increasing focus on APIs, inter-operability, transparency, standards, openness, data portability, and data ownership.

To fully realize our hopes for future applications built along these lines, and our interactions with the information they will present to us, we must rethink three important aspects of how we represent information. These are our model of information ownership and control, the distinction between data and metadata, and how we organize information. I will illustrate why these issues are so fundamental and demonstrate how we are addressing them at Fluidinfo.

I seem to be done with Twitter, at least for now. The graphic shows my monthly usage graph (courtesy of tweetstats) – click for the full-sized image.

I do find Twitter valuable, but I don’t want to spend time on it. It’s a bit like TV or video games for me – I quite enjoy those things, but there are almost always better things to do.

I’ll probably subscribe to some form of Twitter alert or digest at some point. I do find it useful to know when people are coming to Barcelona. But I don’t want to monitor Twitter. Like IM, I find it too distracting and waste too much time just going to check if anything’s new.

Etc.