Universal Data Format Stores All Human Knowledge

Microsoft's Joe Bleaugh was on hand to speak to reporters, attempting to explain the technology in terms that non-technical people could understand.
"What we see happening," explained Bleaugh, "is a general concept of a
THING, where somebody says, 'I've got this THING I want to store on the computer. Or they say, 'I want to send this THING to my friend in jail in Bangkok.' We at Microsoft have been asking, 'How will a person do that?'"

Also on hand was Howard I. Knough, of Sun Systems, a recently acquired subsidiary of Microsoft, "We see a world in which a THING may contain other THINGS, nested to any conceivable level. But people say, 'How can I find my things? What should I name my things?'"

Google's Gene Puhl provided the answers, "We needed an image that people could relate to, something the non-technical user would understand, something that was flexible while also being definitive. We did not want to say, 'THING' because people would be freaked out, kind of like saying, 'The computer is dealing with THINGS like a SWAMP MONSTER THING or the GREEN THING in the fridge.' So we decided on the terms 'File' and 'Directory.'"

"It's like a file is a THING, it can be anything," explained the ebulient
Puhl, "and a directory is also a THING, it's a THING that's full of files."

By using the analogy of a file, with files being nested together into directories, computer scientists believe that any type of information can be represented.

"We know from the enlightened wisdom of the tribe of Melquiades that human
knowledge was ordained to be stored in general-purpose loosely structured hierarchies" said fresh-faced N. Lieu of IBM, "and so this system meets both real needs and the deep-seated irrational delusions that we hold and yet are completely unaware of."

All vendors in the group are touting their own systems of processing the information. There are several competing interface designs which display a hierarchy on the left of the screen and the contents of a file in a main window, allowing the user to "navigate" through the knowledge on their machines. Microsoft calls theirs the "explorer", though some feel
"commander" may be more appropriate, after the original system of this
type.

A further extension is the ability to classify a file, that is, to make it the member of a "class." "This means," said Google's Puhl, "that you kind of like send it to class to have it learn something. So if you send a file to mp3 class, it will be able to make music." Once a file completes its class, it is given a degree to put after its name, like "subdivisions.mp3" or "obfuscate.perl".

The beauty of the system is that it is extensible, so that as new classes are defined they can be added to the explorer. You could teach an audio file to display video, and thereby realize the dream of reusable data.

"We see this as expanding human knowledge the same way radio and television
have done" says Microsoft's Bleaugh, "well, inasmuch as you can listen to music and watch tv on your computer anyway."

Some in the industry question whether this system will compete with Microsoft's touted "WinFS". When asked to comment, Microsoft's Bleaugh stated, "well, you see, with that Winfs thing, what happened was we went to bill's house, and like his parents weren't there, but like bill had some killer smoke, so we put it in the bong and smoked it up and then ballmer was like, 'hey why don't we put files into a relational system' and then like bill said, 'man, it would like searchable and stuff'. And we decided to write it all down but the next day we couldn't figure out how any of it would work." This brought no comment from the other participants.

Others claim that this so-called standard is "dead on arrival." Says Gene Drift of HP, "so you've got this so-called universal, but on Unix a file writes to video memory and on Windows there are no symlinks, so where is the 'universal' is what I want to know?"

-- 
Kenneth Downs
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