At the heart of Roku was a context engine. Here's why we need such a thing, and how we might use it:
Rich Kilmer:
In the digital world, we have so many tools at our disposal thatwe cannot learn them fast enough to create the mapping necessary to translate our goals into action. Could the computer help with this translation between goals and tools?
The point of the context engine was not simply to let people organize information for the sake of organization, but to create a system that enables the computer to help them achieve their goals through that organization.
To do that you need an organization of information ... an ontology. We came up with six high-level categories:
Who -- Entities (People, Groups, Organizations, etc.)
What -- Content (Documents, Web Pages, Books, Music, Video, etc.)
When -- Events (Meetings, Reminders, etc.)
Where -- Locations (Street Addresses, Web Sites, Rooms, Buildings, etc.)
Why -- Goals (Actions, To Dos, Projects, Project Tasks, etc.)
How -- Resources (Roles, Software/Hardware Tools, Morphological tools like
folders topics and searches, user interfaces, etc.)
Roku began in 1995. It ended in May of 2001, during a time of reckoning for the New Economy and for the technologies driving it. The pendulum had to swing, but when people like Rich Kilmer or Nelson Minar of Popular Power, write to me saying they've gone out of business -- as both recently have done -- it becomes clear the pendulum has swung too far.
The ideas embodied by Roku will, Rich says, "live again ... very soon ... in a different language ... and in open source."
I'm glad to hear it! I don't think there's a single way to define the semantic Web, or to achieve the effects we imagine it will bring.
In this volume of Best of BYTE, we explore the emergence of some heuristic algorithms. Although we have only scratched the surface of this intriguing subject, we hope we've suggested the potential of the synthesis of heuristics and algorithms.
