The biggest IT changes in the last 5 years - Hash-Handled-Heisenfiles

I have taken to using a portmanteau phrase "Hash-Handled-Heisenfiles" to try to capture a web-centric phenomenon that appears to be changing one of the longest-standing metaphors in computing. Namely, the desktop concept of a "file".

In the original web, objects had the concept of "location" and this concept of location was very much tied to the concept of the objects "name".

Simply put, if I write "http://tumboliawinery.ie/stock.html", I am strongly suggesting a geographic location (Ireland from the ".ie"), an enterprise in that geography "Tumbolia Winery", and finally a digital object that can be accessed there "stock.html"

Along with the javascript-ification of everything, referenced in the last post, schemes for naming and locating digital objects are increasingly not based on the (RESTian) concepts underpinning the original Web.

One one end of the spectrum you have the well established concept of UID or GUID as used in Relational Databases , Lotus Notes etc. These identifiers, by design are semantics-free. In other words, if you want to get insight into the object itself, what it means or what it is, you get the object via its opaque identifier and then look at its attributes. You can think of it as a faceted classification system of identity. Any attribute or combination of attributes from the object can serve as a form of name. Given enough attributes, the identifier gradually becomes unique - picking out a single object, as opposed to a set of objects. Another way to look at this is that in relational database paradigms, all identifiers that carry semantics are actually queries in disguise. (This area: naming things. Is one of my, um, fixations.)

This is an old phenomenon in Web terms on the server side. Ever since the days of cgi-gateway scripts, developers have been intercepting URLs and mapping them into queries, running behind the firewall, talking SQL-speak to the relational database.

Well, this appears to be changing in that there is an alternative, non-relational notion of identifier that appears to gaining a lot of traction. Namely, the idea of using the hashcode of a digital object as its opaque identifier. Why? Well, because once you do that, the opaque identifier can be independent of location. It could be anywhere. In fact - and this is key bit - it can be in many places at once. Hence Heisenfiles as a tip-o-the-hat to Heisenberg.

Your browser no longer needs to necessarily go to tumboliawinery.ie to get the stock.html object. Instead it can pick it up from wherever by basically saying "Hey. Has anybody out there got an object that hashes to X?".

I think this is a profound change. Why now? I think it is a combination of things. HTML5 Browsers and local storage. Identifiers disappearing into the Javascript and out of URL space. The bizarre-but-powerful concept of hosting a web-server inside the client-side browser The growing interest in all-things-blockchain, in particular smart contracts and Dapps.

All these things I think hint at a future where "file" and "location" are very distinct concepts and identifiers for file-like-objects are hash-values. Interesting times.

The biggest IT changes in the last 5 years

The last time I sat down and seriously worked on content for this blog was, amazingly, over 5 years ago now in 2010.

It coincided with finalizing a large design project for a Legislative Informatics system and resulted in a series of blog posts to attempt to answer the question "What is a Legislature/Parliament?" from an informatics perspective.

IT has changed a lot in the intervening 5 years. Changes creep up on all of us in the industry because they are, for the most part, in the form of a steady stream, rather than a rushing torrent. We have to deal with change every day of our lives in IT. It goes with the territory.

In fact, I would argue that the biggest difference between Computer Science in theory versus Computer Science in practice, is that practitioners have to spend a lot of time and effort dealing with change. Dealing with change effectively, is itself, an interesting design problem and one I will return to here at some point.

If I had to pick out one item to focus on as the biggest change it would without a doubt be the emergence - for good or ill - of a completely different type of World Wide Web. A Web based not on documents and hyperlinks, but on software fragments that are typically routed to the browser in "raw" form and then executed when they get there.

I.e. instead of thinking about http://www.example.com/index.html as a document that can be retrieved and parsed to extract its contents, much of the Web now consists of document "wrappers" that serve as containers for payloads of JavaScript which are delivered to the browser in order to be evaluated as programs.

It can be argued that this is a generalization of the original web in that anything that can be expressed as a document in the original web can be expressed as a program. It can be argued that the modern approach looses nothing but gains a lot - especially in the area of rich interactive behavior in browser-based user interfaces.

However, it can equally be argued that we risk loosing some things that were just plain good about the original Web. In particular, the idea that content can usefully live at a distance from any given presentation of that content. The idea that content can be retrieved and processed with simple tools as well as big javascript enabled browsers.

I can see both sides of it. At the time I did the  closing keynote at XTech 2008 I was firmly in the camp mourning the loss of the web-of-documents. I think I am still mostly there. Especially when I think about documents that have longevity requirements and documents that have legal status. However, I can see a role that things like single-page webapps can play. As is so often the case in IT, we have a tendency to fix what needed fixing in the old model but introducing collateral damage to what was good about the old model.

Over time, in general, the pendulum swings back. I don't think we have hit "peak Javascript" yet but I do believe that there is an increasing realization that Javascript is not a silver bullet, any more than XHTML was ever a silver bullet.

The middle-way, as ever, beckons as a resting place. Who knows when we will get there. Probably just in time to make room for some newly upcoming pendulum swinging that is gathering place on the server side. Namely the re-emergence of content addressable storage which is part of the hashification of everything. I want to get to that next time.

Talking at this years Congregation Unconference event in Cong, Mayo

My topic this year is music and where it might be headed post the "economics of scarcity" business model. A model that started with radio broadcasts and gramaphones, generated many rich people (middlemen and performers), fueled many a career aspiration up to 2015, but has come to a grinding halt with mp3s, streaming services etc.

http://www.congregation.ie/2015-attendees/sean-mcgrath-topic-music.html

Congregation Digital Media Gathering

Going to go to this un-conference again this year. Last year's was fun providing plenty of food for thought.

http://www.congregation.ie/

https://twitter.com/hashtag/cong15?src=hash

It all boils down to this

A lot of what I work on, a lot of what I think about, a lot of my own journey into epistemology, Zen, Music. Semiotics, Legisprudence and computer science can be neatly summarized thus:

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Art versus Science

An interesting conversation about art versus science has broken out on my FB page here

Time, is waiting in the wings, it speaks of senseless things. Its pawns are you and me.....

The title of this short post is a David Bowie lyric. From back when David Bowie's lyrics were every bit as symbolistic (?) as say, Bob Dylans....

...But I digress and I have not even started.

When all the smoke clears I think I will conclude that my entire career has been devoted to better understanding of TIME. How to model it. What it means. How to build systems that understand it.

In coming posts, I will be coming back to it again and again but for now, let me start with this.

Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) is now an established acronym for an information management discipline in which the concept of TIME (and its co-joined twin) CHANGE, are central.

There is now a Tech Center in Ireland devoted to it : GRCTC and I am involved in it personally on behalf of Propylon.

Many other words get dragged in here too. Concepts like digital permanence, authenticity, provenance, audit trails, change markup, semantic deltas...

Some of these I have touched on here in the past, some not.

I think maybe I will start with blockchains as they are quite topical at the moment and I think blockchains is one of the first really interesting things to come along in the area of authenticity/provenance since the concept of Public Key Cryptography.