16 November 2008

Data, Diagrams and Decisions

It is obvious I should use a life that I have the most control over to experiment with its data generation, diagrams of its storage, and decisions on its access & usage. That life is my mine or my son's. As I prepare my LEF Grant brief for 11 Dec 08, I have to orient the audience's mindset to mine so they have the best opportunity to comprehend what I am about to share. So the first section of the brief, Opening Section: Bridging Mindsets and Mind Shares, attempts to bridge their mindset with the mindshares of the virtual world, virtual reality, virtual environment communities I've been investingating since 2007 in 10 slides. You can replace virtual with synthetic or cyber too.

There is one slide preceding the bridge that covers the LEF Grant proposal that got me started on this journey. It states the six items I planned to learn and three items I planned to deliver to the LEF Forum. Since I didn't get the opportunity to work on this grant full-time for the 370+ hours as I hoped to (and was expected to by the LEF Forum), I've only work part-time and sometimes sporadically at that. The LEF Grant report to follow the briefing will be submitted to the LEF Library sometime in early 2009.

The X3D Section is an overview of the syntax and architecture of X3D. I will provide a context of X3D advantages and disadvantages by discussing other scene graph languages that have come and go, and are still in use. Humanoid Animation, ISO/IEC 14774, will be discussed and its working group's activities too. The Web3D Consortium has 13 working groups defined but only a fraction are active. Those being X3D Earth, H-Anim, MedX3D, and the CAD WG to name a few. I'm one of three co-chairs for the CAD WG, which is working to update the standard so X3D exporters will be common place in the menu system of CAD packages. This feature will accelerate the reuse of CAD data in more links of the Supply, Value and Customer chains. I will raise a few questions and suggestions about the need for updates to the X3D specification for Life Graph software to work well in every type (3) of enterprise.

The Enterprise Section is a brief look at the digital data generation, storage, and disposition rates of governments, corporations and citizens. This is where I discuss the rate of CAD data per product in the global marketplace. I describe the perfect storm of demand and acceleration of content creation from the obessession to have a Life Graph with financials and X3D for all traded items an enterprise comes to possess. I'm thinking about how to document the 100 years of the digital lifestyle in only a decade for each enterprise type. For citizen enterprises, this could means I find 0-, 10-, 20-, 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-, 70-, 80-, 90-yr olds (male & female) and track their digital data creation from financial transactions for one decade to create a baseline of a 100-yr human life. How I extrapolate the digital data creation volume per transaction from the study's decade to nine decades out is beyond me. Maybe I'll trace the 3D CAD industry's product pentration and data volume (ignoring format incompatibilities) from it's origin to today. Your suggestions are welcomed. Free publications with these profiles are desired even more!

The Application Section is were I flip through 13 or more UML/SysML diagrams of the rudimentary architecture and design paradigms for Life Graph Software. First, there is the native XML database management system and its interface to the X3D browser. Then the X3D browser architecture is described (borrowed from Xj3D probably) with many additional features to enable the "selective sell back" capability that defines my Blue Ocean Strategy. Last, are designs for many interfaces that make for artifically intelligent management of the Life Graph, which is critical for additive usage and viral adoption.

The Closing Section is my platform to elaborate on the X3D demand creation options available to Government, Corporations and Citizens. Ultimately, I have to prototype all but the mundane use case to grab the enterprises' attention of the potential in the idea of Life Graph software. It starts with planning in X3D by referencing behavioral intelligence reports in X3D and placing X3D products for purchase in future states of the Life Graph. Watch out Franklin-Covey and Certified Financial Planners! Then it transitions to previewing your AI possessions in X3D, which includes acoustics and haptics features when possible. Finally, it ends with being solicited by a market research company who is willing to buy 15 years worth of authentic behavior and planned behavior for $25. It takes only 2 minutes and 5 human-machine interface events (generalized to accomodate voice, tactile, temporal and/or kinetic commanding methods) to command Life Graph software to prepare the behavior patterns and send them securely to the company's servers or diretly to research agent's storage device via bluetooth.

27 October 2008

I've been tasked to build bridges!

That's right, I have to build bridges between a 3D graphics file format as a fabric of a computer-aided mirror world building and those CSCers and clients who will login to my webcast 11 Dec 08. My LEF Grant director tasked me to build bridges because my audience will need a clear path from their idea of what I'm presenting to my vision of what I haven't implemented in software, hardware and netware. It's that simple--your recurring communications challenge between the infopreneur and the interested few.

Paul G. and I met for the first time this month in Garrity's Bar & Grill at the Hyatt Regency Tech Center (Denver, CO). He gave me a copy of CSC's Digital Disruptions, a LEF Report that just hit the street. I read it on the 12-hr flight to Kuwait City, Kuwait. If you can get a copy do so, it's a treasure trove of disruptive trends in our digital lifestyle that you must know about.

The way I see it, there are at least four bridges for me to build. the first bridge is between the audience's idea of planning and preserving a lifetime of financial transactions and my idea of artifically intelligent LifeGraph software/netware application (nHand) with 3D graphics, haptics and acoustics. Those financial transactions are derived from a person's medical and health profile, material and non-material possessions, which may have the motion capture profile of each embedded in its data structure. The idea that the creator of the service and/or good is the creator of the 3D content must get emphasized because the idea downplays the consumer authoring their own scene graphs when the manufacturer and service provider are being persuaded to do so by increasing the potential for LifeGraph customers to aggregrate their structural and behavior patterns for sell back to the product developers that contributed to it in the first place.

The second bridge is between the audience's likely perception of another database product heavily dependent on manual input and configuration in a competitive market of resource management solutions and my Blue Ocean Strategy to create a market that will serve those who don't even realize they want to be served with a solution like LifeGraph. Some call this thought process a solution looking for a problem. On the personal level, Franklin-Covey planning systems, Intuit's Quicken, or ERP, MRP solutions on the corporate and governmental levels are icons to compare LifeGraph's features.

The third bridge is between the audience's inevitable assocation or familiarization with Second Life's feature set and what this LifeGraph feature set has that is enabled with X3D. X3D is extensible because it leverages the XML so I have to show the demarcation of the file format, the XML database, X3D browser, ECMAScript and Java function, feature and object points that will make this a killer app like search, email and desktop publishing applications.

The fourth bridge is between the customer value proposition via this vaporware descriptoin and the beginnings of the unified ontology, system architecture diagrams and life cycle maintenance strategy to keep up with the evolution of humans & medicine, earth science and product development.

With these four bridges illustrated in MS PowerPoint hopefully using some X3D for each bridge, I will suceed at creating a view into a future where citizens, corporate officials and government officials are empowered with their patterns of behaviors to use at their will and advantage to plan better and/or prove their case.

28 September 2008

10 Weeks to LEF Grant Brief - What to expect

I have 45 minutes to shed light on X3D's utility in the evolution of Enterprise Applications for my CSC family. Where do I start and what is my message? What do I exclude and what do I include? X3D is a large specification and like any programming language it takes hundreds of hours to master its usage and application for custom solutions to unique problems or creative ideas. My LEF Grant application enumerates my deliverables so I really don't have a lot to decide. I just have to decide how to present my findings and works in progress so my audience understands my thought process and the technology limitations to enable the Life Graph concept in software, hardware and netware. The resulting questions in the last 15 minutes of an hour long Webcast will be the test of how well I piqued the interest of enteprise architects to examine the X3D standards as a Web 2.0 technology enabler for corporate and government enterprises, while my presentation uses the citizen as an enterprise to understand Extensible 3D standards.

An excerpt from my LEF Grant Proposal APPROACH Section follows.

My approach to carry out this grant is to study the X3D language to architect a software application that will satisfy the requirements for enterprise resource and its asset management needs and wants not met in textual and 2D graphical applications. I will define requirements and use cases based on corporate and professional decisions made and planned. I will then architect a system of networks, computers, and applications flowing X3D content and identify the software technologies (e.g., security and artificial intelligence) required to automate the exchange of X3D content with the goal to provide B2B cooperation for consumer convenience is the goal.

08 September 2008

Your Life Graph composed of X3D Scene Graphs!

I think it is funny how one can play with words and think (s)he may have coined an new one until searching the Internet. That happened to me today after dinner as I pondered how should the X3D Specifications change, if at all, to support a lifetime of data in scene graphs representing the user's body, bought goods & services, and plots of land (and other natural resources one can have deed/title too). When I hit the Return button after typing "life graph" in the Google Search engine, over 9,000 hits returned. So much for a coining a new term. Maybe I replace nHand software with LifeGraph software for a title of my vaporware!

Let me tell you what I've stumbled across over the last month and what real work remains. The Digital Humnan Consortium is the highlight of my surfing. Apparently for the last seven years a loose group of human modelers have form a virtual organization to implement a digital model of the male and female human bodies using the open source paradigm. The First International Conference on Digital Human Modeling occurred in Beijing, China in July 2007 in the framework of the 12th Int'l Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2007 with eight other thematically similar conferences. ISBN: 978-3-540-73318-8 is the 1068 proceedings available for $139 from Springer.com. The initiative is Herculean because the Consortium's goals include federating several human body simulations from the microscopic functions of cells in all tissues to the macroscopic behaviors of organ systems responding to external stimuli like surgery, toxic fumes, vehicle crashes, etc.

From an X3D perspective, I just want to know if the Consortium will deliver their simulation results via the WWW and use X3D on mega and gigapixel displays or even volumetric displays to do so. I forwarded some info to the Chairs of the Working Groups for Medical X3D and Human Animination (H-Anim) because the hierarchy of computation burden would be simulation, as the most intensive, then animation and finally visualization. When I thought about my concept of scene graphs given with the goods & services of purchases that are digitally signed with date & time stamps in sequence on the user's "life graph", I imagined web services to for a fee or free that fetched data too computationally and/or informationally intensive for the user's computing machinery. Basically, the architecture design for nHand (Life Graph) software will entail a Software as a Servcie (SaaS) component to allow owners/users of goods & services to submit their digtially signed and registered products or digital human models to ...providers for simulation and get back an X3D file that will drive an Life Graph animation that answers the questions vividly and possibly with synthesized sounds & voices.

Three classes of examples are buying a part and/or service for your body. You submit the lastest digital model of yourself in lieu of visiting the service provider and/or manufacturer for whatever reason and they reply with parametrics of the good's fitness for purpose as tailored to your anthropometric model. In the case of a service, the provider will send back an animation of how your human body will be manipulated. The second class of example is with a good or service for a good or service you own or regularly purchase, like your vehicle, be it your bicycle, plane, truck or yacht. You transfer your vehicle's digital model to a regulator for inspection or licensing after repairs where complete in the digital model and the regulator will given you a conditional permit or license based on the trust in the digital signature trail of qualified parts and mechanics who installed and checked out the installation. The third class of example is natural resource usage. Say you have a lawn (landscape) that needs regrading because of water erosion or some other slow pace effect cumulating into a situation requiring immediate attention. The owner might go out and securely transmit their landscape in digital (X3D) form (i.e., subterranean and terranean features) to a lawn doctor for editing/authoring that represents the plan result if they service it or the County Land Title Office for work permits, etc.

I sent two or three emails to contacts on a few of the Digital Human Consortium web sites but no responses (and no surprise).

09 August 2008

Message for Enterprises to create demand for X3D integral content

I've been home for 22 days and it's been a blast to spend so much time with my 3-month old son. He was my top priority, as to be expected, so the X3D demand messages I have for the three types of enterprises are relatively short and simple. I am referring to the messages I said I would write during this R&R in my previous post.

Citizens: I am collecting 3D models of what I buy for my digital life inventory and I need an internationally standardized, open source, royalty-free, information rich 3D scene graph of this item I just purchased. How and when can I get it emailed to me or where can I download it?

Coporations: This company is transforming the way it manages its information and records. We are developing a mirror corporation in cyberspace and we need the 3D graphics files for the goods and services from the manufacturers and service providers to effectuate our vision. These data have to match or exceed the life of the good and service so only an internationally standardized, open source, royalty-free, information rich 3D scene graphs of the purchased items will suffice. How fast can we start receiving these scene graphs or do we need to find a supplier? By the way, we have a product development that provides the X3D scene graph of our goods and services to our customers at the time if not shortly after the exchange of money for the goods and/or services.

Governments: The government of _________________ procurement policy statement states, all goods and services procured for itself shall have an internationally standardized, open source, royalty-free, information rich 3D scene graph of the item. The digital file shall be integrated into the record and geospatially positioned to the points of installation, storage, usage and/or diposition.

08 July 2008

Thought Leadership; Demand Creation n Govt 1st

I'm headed home in a few days for over three weeks before returning to Baghdad, Iraq. I will create vivid messages for citizens, non-governmental organizations (i.e., corporations) and governmental organizations (i.e. county, state, national and supranational) to tailor for their use at integrating their 3D (meta)data into their enterprise system of all records (e.g., tax, voting, driving, criminal, ...health, academic, banking, credit, legal, insurance, medical, marriage & divorce, adoption, travel, identification, flying, boating & sailing, ...diving, fitness, land, job performance, etc.).

I'm convinced a viable "Blue Ocean Strategy" for developing the next Killer App and it being about 3D content is creating the demand for it for the three user groups above. As a citizen and consumer of goods and services, I have to ask for the distilled 3D CAD of what I buy from my grocer, clothier, homebuilder, car dealer, and medical & health providers. As a corporate employee, I have to request the distilled 3D CAD for the business goods and services the corporation purchases. If I was a public official, I would have to specify distilled 3D CAD with Digital Rights Management restrictions lifted for the goals of e-government that require unlimited distribution of the goods and services bought with taxpayers dollars.

The consequence of these groups storing the distilled 3D CAD data that are correlated to financial transactions is the opportunity to sell it back in the marketplace! Consumers' buying patterns and plans are valuable to manufacturers and service providers. Citizens will be able to cull out the most intricate behavioral patterns and plans for marketing firms willing to buy a piece of consumers' date and time tagged life. Companies will be able to offer 3D or 4D grades of services by preforming estimates using the clients virtual world richly tagged with metadata of the objects and animation in the scene graph. And governments will be have the virtual domain of public lands, land improvements and mobile assets to simulate and analyze their prepardness and capacities to serve their citizens and corporations during disasters. I think 3D data standardization and proliferation will be a win-win propostion for the authors and accumulators.

Marketing these ideas without jaw dropping demostrations is the problem I face. For the (average) citizen in the industrialized world choosing the digital lifestyle (don't ask what this means), I am guessing the accumulation of no more than 10 MB per day on average for 3D data and all the metadata (primitives and derivatives). One will measure himself, buy a material good, receive a service, and/or buy 3D data of owned or leased natural resources. That amounts to 10^7 B/day * 3.65 x 10^4 days = 3.65 x 10^11 B/human life span. And assuming there are 2B people living the digital lifestyle worldwide today, that's a lot of data over a century of life. Corporations on the other hand rarely live to be 100 years old, however, they are orders of magnitude larger in physical assets and throughput. Since corporations are legal concepts only, the employees of the corporation are not property of them and the distilled 3D CAD of employees are not counted more than once. But the relationship is there as a hyperlink. Corporate finanical purchasing and consumption & ownerhip of products that have accompanying 3D data is estimated at no more than 10^7 B/day per corporation. Lastly, averaging all governmental spending with 3D data to be distilled for enterprise integration, I guess it accumulates no faster than 10^7 B/organization/day.

From a transaction perspective the bounds for each class of consumer should not be any higher than the number of phone calls/text messages, emails or payment / purchase card transactions per day. Keep in mind the number of financial transactions might be orders of magnitude less than the number of items with 3D CAD part of that purchase. Let's just guess the average daily rate for items with 3D CAD representations acquired are <10^2 (citizen), <10^4 (corporation) and <10^4 (government). Now multiplying these rates by the number of days you get number of unique items in get entity's virtual world (for 100 years): ~10^6 (citizen), ~10^8 (corporation), and ~10^8 (government). Those are large scene graphs (polygon count). 64-bit computing is necessary assuming these graphs would be continuous and on one media device.

31 May 2008

The ultimate trial case--my first born

Even though I have not finished my grant report (2 monthss over due now), I've just been blessed with the ultimate test subject for creating a life log of financially anchored transactions with artifacts of geometry that could be documented using X3D and managed in a virtual world/environment. As of 06 May 08, I am the father and a parent of a healthy baby boy.

For the health view I have fetal sonagrams in 2D and 3D that are date and time stamped. I have MPEG4 HD quality video and audio, and megapixel 24-bit color photos too of him. I inventoried his possessions, some 355 items (durable items only; diapers and such aren't counted even though we bought them) and dropped them into Home Inventory of Quicken for Mac for my wife to tag the 13 fields about each picture (a single-sided 2D view). He doesn't own any land yet and he doesn't have a financial account (i.e., 529) just yet either--next year for his first birthday he'll have a college fund established.

Anyway, the best I'm doing is collecting the manufacturers names and products we patronized to provide the lifestyle we choose for him.

One another note, I'm still waiting to start my duties as the Co-chair for the Web3D Consortium 3D CAD Working Group this summer. That should be an exciting time as the working group revitalizes itself with standard making activities.

I've been on the periphery of the recent flurry of activity in the H-Anim working group.