Friday, December 18, 2009

Think Piece draft text - what do you think?

Life is continuous, complex and complicated with the clutter of property and personal relationships in stressing environments. This think piece is written to express the features of a killer (actually keeper) application incorporating a vision of information management and control for the lifetime of legal persons lasting at least a century. A century is composed of 36,525 days or 876,000 hours or 52,596,000 minutes or 3,155,760,000 seconds. The motivation to write this is to galvanize resources to invent, innovate, produce, publish, manufacture, market and sell the ideas, intellectual properties and instruments that enable legal persons to attain and manage their mirror world with unprecedented simplicity, minimal consumption of energy and head-spinning speed. A goal I wish you adopt after reading this is to continually create the demand for an openly computable version of traded items you acquire so the market responds by quickening the pace of standardization and harmonization for LifeGraphs, which are mobile mirror worlds sometimes on but usually off the internet.

LifeGraph is not a new term; just search it and your search engine will return tens of thousand of hits depending on how you typed it. The extension of its meaning to a mobile mirror world with its architecture comprising a native XML database management system for the xml encoded direct acyclic graphs (DAG) of 3D geometry, 3D sound and 3D touch with semantics may be new. It is imperative to mention two similar concepts, LifeLogs and LifeStreams. LifeLogs have become associated with the research of Gordon Bell, a famous computer scientist who works at Microsoft Research. David Gerlenter, author of Mirror Worlds, is strongly associated with the paradigm of LifeStreams. I think Lifegraph fits in the middle of the two terms, hopefully representing a blue ocean for governments, corporations and citizens to harvest its latent wealth of knowledge. Who will create a blue ocean strategy that will be funded and successfully implemented as the killer app of the 21st century is to be seen. There are products in the market today that portend the ubiquitous data creation, transformation and integration necessary for software companies and open source initiatives to leverage.

The LifeGraph analytical framework will be described using 30 correlated terms covering the temporal, structural, behavioral, financial, and informational properties of ownership. The temporal dimension of LifeGraphs is very long compared to software product life cycles and that is a major challenge when engaging investors on technologies that are suppose to match or outlive governments, corporations and natural persons approaching or exceeding 100 years of age. The structural dimension of LifeGraphs has a huge dynamic range (e.g., nano to mega, or 10^15) in terms of parts, elements and components of humans, legal persons and products, which are formed, measured and designed as systems of one type or another. The behavioral dimension of LifeGraphs can be completely irrational yet totally predictable over the century of life, depending on the exogenous forces acting on the plans of the legal persons and their properties. The financial dimension of LifeGraphs is described in terms of cost, price and value of traded items. The informational dimension of LifeGraphs is seen terms of data for rendering text & imagery, synthesizing sound and feeding back touch.

A LifeGraph stores scene graphs that have acoustic, haptic (as well as graphic) and metadata that are semantically compliant with ontological models of the billions of globally traded items, the hundreds of thousands of clinical terms & medical concepts for humans and the tens of thousands terms & concepts for nature's living creations and non-living formations. If not the common heritage of mankind, these objects are owned by governments, corporations and/or citizens. Today in the USA, there are ~6K governments but ~6M offices; ~10M corporations but with ~100M offices; and ~300M citizens, however the number of them what are 100 years or older today is fewer than 150K. This number is growing primarily because the number of centenarians will significantly increase during the 21st century due to better healthcare. Will the centenarians, corporations, and governments of the late 21st century favor lifelogging, lifegraphing and/or lifestreaming? What will be the reservoirs of lifelogs, lifegraphs and lifestreams? What will the ratio of these databases be with respect to one another and by owner type (i.e., government, corporation and citizen). What will be the adoption and abandonment rates for each? All of these questions and more will depend on the laws, policies and practices regarding items of ownership.

The literature on lifelogs and lifestreams seem to imply they are personal information management paradigms because the end user is written about as a private citizen, not a corporate or government official/employee performing duties for their respective legal person. LifeGraphs will be presented as a information management paradigm for governmental, business and personal information management systems because legal and natural persons are tightly coupled by the trade of goods and services, especially information, during their entire lifetime. The enterprise resource planning and manufacturing resource planning systems of the value and supply chains can be regarded as finally integrating with the consumer chain's resource planning systems. The fact these terms, ... planning systems, are modified at least three different ways is a consequence of product marketing. They are designed to efficiently plan for resources, monitor & track resources and retrieve or report information on once had resources. LifeGraph software is not much different in principle but its architecture includes virtual reality technologies for photo-realistic 3D graphics, synthesized 3D acoustics and haptics, all physics-based.

Blue Ocean strategists are asking how much information will be repurposed, how fast will it transfer and where is it leaving/going over a century of life for legal persons using a LifeGraph amongst other software applications and data structures to be effective and efficient with their limited resources? Those strategist realize LifeGraph software will affect the digital ecosystem's reservoirs, rates and ratios because it will obviate much of the digital information inertia that exists today by equipping owners with systems that allow them to assemble, sign and encrypt graphlets for trade. The blue ocean will be comprised of these untapped reservoirs, and the transfer of wealth will come with an evolution of market research protocols to access these reservoirs. Conversely, an evolution in product quality & delivery that replete these reservoirs will necessarily precede the research evolution. That evolution will be defined by manufacturers and service providers comprising the supply and value chains repurposing their products' 3D graphics, 3D acoustics and 3D haptics artifacts into files for the consumer chain. Consumers are expected to record their product usage and disposition hence adding value and taking the role of those in the supply and value chains. This behavior occurs today between governments, corporations and citizens but the overwhelming majority of objects' information aren't readily available nor transmitted at point of sale in XML encoded scene graphs.

Besides selling one's LifeGraph in increments of graphlets, owners will plan in 3D (e.g., body sculpting, material goods servicing and land acquisitions) with LifeGraph software editing tools that leverage smart product catalogs and the digital human model of the LifeGraph owner. With or without plans in e-memory, owners will integrate streams and logs of monitoring and tracking data from their instrumented property items and person via network connections. If plans exist then change detection is possible using those plans and actual objects' history. If plans don't exist, change detection is possible with the log and stream data on an item by item basis or assemblies of these mirror world objects. The options for real-time interaction with mirror worlds will include the use of an augmented reality engine. Pointing a video camera and microphone or two and augmenting that scene with your parts of a mirror world at sometime in the past, present or future to rate match the real-time nature of the streaming video and audio channels will open many possibilities for LifeGraph owners.

This is data even for one middle-class natural person in the U.S.A. when a 100-year baseline is considered for system architecting and designing. Digital data volume summaries of people and/or products spanning their life are practically impossible to find open source. Unless the counting is autonomic like breathing it's just not going to happen consistently over the person's lifetime. That's why LifeGraph success depends on public law, corporate policy and common practice. The payment card industry boasts about the tens of millions of merchants worldwide who will accept payment cards. That industry experienced linear growth from its inception until public usury law changed that allowed the industry to patronize States that gave a profitable incentive to incorporate in their State. After that public law took effect, the industry realized geometric growth.

A Digital Data Volume Summary Record
[units of measure] hierarchy of ten levels is below.

trades(traded items(transactions(files(rules(concepts(terms(parameters(values(bytes(bits))))))))))

0) bytes
1) values
3) parameters
3) terms
4) concepts
5) rules
6) files
7) transactions
8) traded items
9) trades

The number of bytes in a century old LifeGraph in early 22nd century for natural persons who are average accumulators of wealth* might be on the order of 3 x 10^15 bytes. Those petabytes contains values of parameters whether, UTF-16, RGB codes or cartesian coordinates. The number of values should be an order of magnitude less than byte size so 3 x 10^14 values. There will be far fewer unique parameters in a LifeGraph than the number of values, say 3 x 10^4. Terms probably will sum to 3 x 10^6; concepts, 3 x 10^5; rules 3 x 10^3; files 3 x 10^7; transactions easily will topple 3 x 10^7; traded items, real and digital, undoubtedly will approach 3 x 10^7 if one counts the piece parts that are serviceable; trades (not just securities) can and will contain many traded items, which can be financed causing many transactions to pay for it. In turn, there are 3 x 10 4 rules associated with the financing, the traded item's usage and taxes. The concepts behind rules exist in a smaller proportion, 3 x 10^3. Terms are often parameters but let's distinguish between

0) semantics-syntax-standards

1) persons-nature-products
2) governments-corporations-citizen
3) supply chain-value chain-consumer chain

4) data-models-simulators
5) memory-processors-telecommunications
6) graphics-acoustics-haptics

7) creations-reconfigurations-dispositions
8) plan-present-past
9) cost-price-value

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Business Plan - Outline and Product descriptions

I want your feedback on the roadmap for LifeGraph software features and capabilities. The Life in LifeGraph refers to a natural and legal persons, which are expected to live to 100 years. The Graph in LifeGraph refers to the trajectory, orientation, configuration, and operation of the natural person, a product or an instance of nature as classified by some taxonomy or ontology. Ownership is the concept that filters or bounds the scope of LifeGraphs. If and when you think about LifeGraphs you should remember you are thinking about what a person owns and not merely possesses or is in proximity to something or someone. The mobile mirror world (MMW) I seek to make available to everyone with access to a computer is a world of items traded between legal and/or natural persons during the lifetime of the person. Moreover, the periods of life when a natural person is incapable of trading (strictly speaking) those items provided to him/her are treated as if he/she traded for them. Specifically, I'm referring to natural persons in infancy, childhood, etc. and senile seniors.

The following outline will serve as a guide for the next 20 posts. I found this Table of Contents at www.bplans.com for software companies. There are hundreds of samples to choose from so I am not going to put much energy into format now.

Executive Summary
Objectives
Keys to success
Mission
Company Summary
Products
Market Analysis Summary
Strategy and Implementation Summary
Management Summary
Financial Plan
Appendix

I hope to make LifeGraph software affordable to everyone who can afford any computer system, new or used--say $10 (2010 dollars). Ironically, I see a paper-based product developing concurrently with LifeGraph software that will sell for $100 (2010 dollars) a volume just to appeal to the traditionalists who will like an acid-free paper version bounded under hardcover to last a century. A volume is a decade's worth of object-oriented transactions pretty-formatted, indexed and printed for binding.

LifeGraphs are native XML databases with valid and well-formed XML documents that are encoded with the 3D geometry, 3D acoustics and 6-DoF haptics for tangible items (i.e., goods). These documents are either richly or poorly annotated with financial, legal, regulatory and operational safety parameters found on receipts, warranties, packaging labels, instructional manuals, notices, and other printed materials for the good. Services are XML documents that animate the behavior delivered. Since the recipient of the service may not own any of the goods to be in a configuration to receive the service, the standards for providing the 3D characteristics of those items are questionable. For example, if you buy a $300 ticket to attend the superbowl and you don't even get a paper ticket but just have to show two government issued ID cards, what does the ticket seller provide you for your LifeGraph?