Re: Massively distributed data
Date: Wed, 12 May 2004 13:49:15 +0300
Message-ID: <40a20063$1_at_post.usenet.com>
"Dawn M. Wolthuis" <dwolt_at_tincat-group.com> wrote in message
news:c7s5um$7nk$1_at_news.netins.net...
> I think this is a fascinating question and maybe some of you will agree
and
> will have suggestions. I sat next to Jim Waldo from Sun at a lunch at a
> Jini Community Conference in Boston earlier this year. He was talking
about
> medical information coming directly from people in some way. The idea
would
> be to have information about the health of an individual come from their
> body. This was still in the stage of formulating the problem statement,
so
> the rest is just related to my own reflections on the problem.
I hope this would not be possible :-)
> People have the option of wearing a patch wherein is recorded an ID (for
> example, a US Social Security Number) and it is able to capture the
person's
> temperature. Now, let's just grant that somehow this information can be
> communicated, in a secure fashion, to some health service to which this
> person subscribes. Similar to a home security network, this person can be
> alerted by their health organization when their temperature goes from a
> green to a yellow or red zone. Perhaps it is another service with which
> this person subscribes for saliva samples, which are not continuously
> present, but for whicih the sample is taken automatically whenever the
> person brushes their teeth.
What a nightmare ! :-)
Have you done a search on "intelligent dust" ?
> My not-necessarily-brilliant thinking is that each such attribute
(variable)
> for each entity (person) could be registered as/with a (software; web)
> service. Instead of grabbing data into a central location, this highly
> distributed "data base" would not typically be viewed as sets of values,
but
> with each value as a node in this graph of data.
>
> It seems to me that without moving hoards of data around, refashioning
this
> tree/graph into relations, the live data (the word "live" takes on new
> meaning!) could be researched by a service that discovers the data it is
> looking for and reports against them. Health-o-meters (services) could
> crawl through this live data without rehosting it (potentially for all the
> people in the world).
>
> This massively distributed database might then require (or at least be
> well-served by) a separate "data source" for each value in the database.
> Which brings me to my question about new ways of specifying data sources.
> If nothing is coming down the pike for this, then I'll just have to come
up
> with it myself, eh?
>
> This seems to me to be an example of where a graph of data just makes a
> whole lot more sense than applying only relational operators, but I'm
> certain I have not thought through every possible approach to such a
> problem. Does anyone have any ideas on what database theory would be
> relevant to this not-highly-formulated problem statement for a massively
> distributed database?
Well, if all sensors will always be reliable :-) then the question of data
integrity is reduced to taking snapshots of all sensors "belonging" to a
person at the same moment.
But:
- the sensors are not reliable - one can make fun of sensors - there is no way for a sensor to identify a person - to have a picture of the health of a person, you need to collect some datain one place
- is this question about DBMSs or about "intelligent agents" ? I thought the purpose of a DBMS is to resolve the problems of data SHARING. :-)
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