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ewH

Great post, Sig!

The fun/reality factor of life is definitely missing in IT and frankly, business in general. Our definition of work has been skewed by the same methods as the old style teacher that tries to "hammer in a commonly accepted curriculum, theories merely served as a digested and manipulated version of reality."

I'm looking forward to more great things coming from Thingamy soon.

Cheers,
-ewH

Duncan Drennan

I had a thingamy related thought rocket through my head while working on documentation today.... ;)

Let's assume that every company in the world is using thingamy (by this time you are more wealthy than Bill Gates and Warren Buffet combined). Now we know that thingamy maps real world objects. This means that effectively all things are mapped in thingamy.

Now the obvious thing that pops to mind is that many things would be mapped multiple times, which doesn't really make sense. For example, each of a bank's clients would have the bank's address, and so on, mapped. If the bank were to change its address, then all of its clients would also have to go and change their "bank" object's address....lots of replication.

The obvious solution would be to turn things on their head and only have one bank object, which the bank themselves would administer. So if the bank's address were to change, the next time one of its clients was to draw the raw info for a document it would be correct. (I'm sure by now you are seeing where I'm going with this....)

Obviously the bank's object would not be totally open – certain info would be "private" or "internal" etc. (to draw parallels with OO programming).

So the outcome would really be a "thingamy net", a second life (one that maps reality), an entire service that the world's info could run on. All of reality mapped to raw data, all of it waiting to have logical filters applied.....you up for it?

sig

Duncan, well of course! (being up for it :))

Interesting that you are picking up on that point - that is one of the traits of thingamy as it does not really set any fictional borders, not limited to a "corporation".
One side of that is it does not see any difference between resources - employees, contractors, government, neighbours, customers - all the same in principle.

That said it should not be dependent on having to run the whole world to work! A bit hard sell-in that I suspect... hehe

Back to the bank account, a very interesting object for this discussion as the funny thing is that I do interact with my bankaccount data-object online already. The account is already property of the bank, I'm just renting space therein and I have to interact directly with that data-object either by logging on at the bank or let my say accounting package do it.

So as you say, the data-object representing an account would be within the bank's system and if in compatible format my local system should be able to extract the data when needed for my reports. Even Quicken does that today with shareprices :)

Then extend that thinking to say my address. An address as a data-object does only represent one real-world object that never changes relationship - my house.
Like the bank I suspect there are local authorities that already have such data-objects. Then, in the system where I'm represented by a data-object the address and I would be linked... and so forth.
It's doable, it's already done but with much effort and on a piecemeal basis between very disparate systems.

Wow, indeed, food for thought here! But basically, one data-object per real-world object - and as small as possible, preferably only with properties that (almost) never change (me: name, birthdate, social security number). There would be no limit how atomised you could go - at the end it will be a question of finding a balance between practical and theoretically ideal models.
Just like physics, they still tweak their reality models as they find new and smaller buildingblocks :)

Duncan Drennan

"That said it should not be dependent on having to run the whole world to work! A bit hard sell-in that I suspect... hehe"

I must concur :) But, you get the idea. As real-world objects join the thingamy network they have the opportunity to take over their thingamy net objects.

Yes certainly...food for thought

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