DC ACM Talk w/Nick Polys was a success

I opened, closed then answered several questions in front of an audience of 35 computer enthusiasts and professionals 10 Jun 2009 at the AAAS Building from 07:30 p.m. to 9:15 p.m. Nick spoke for 25 minutes on the technical history and outlook of the Extensible 3D specifications, implementations and emendations. Many in the audience wonder about the societal effects of LifeGraphs if they were to emerge under the conditions I described. As expected, a few opinions were negative from the perspective of "Big Brother" issues. These opinions were balanced with questions like, "Are you going to write a book?" and "How do you plan to develop this?"

I continue to query CIOs in health and medical centers about a womb to postmortem health maintenance data (reference) model. And I continue to get no replies to what I think is a simple statistical question. I have enlisted someone from CSC Healthcare to ask the question whenever the opportunity arises. I was surprised to discover I emailed the Harvard Medical School CIO 12 months ago asking the question and just a week ago during a call with my CSC Healthcare colleague, he said he will pose the question to the HMS CIO. I completely forgot about my cold email when he mentioned their relationship, and I haven't heard back from either of them.

Just yesterday, I watched a Webinar on healthcare semantics where dbMotion's prominent employees presented a great story about their virtual patient record that could have womb to tomb medical information/records. But when I asked my data reference model question during the Q&A, the speaker had no clue how much data might accumulate over 100 years of life for an average patient in the US medical care system. I don't know when I'm going to let this question go and just start estimating myself then publish it for comment. That decision is coming as I turn my attention to the natural resources data reference model challenge.

Speaking to the DC Chapter of Association of Computing Machinery

I was invited to talk about X3D for Enterprise Applications to the DC ACM after talking to the chapter president in Jan 09. Goto www.dcacm.org for the evening meeting details. It's a FREE event so please consider attending. This opportunity has forced me to speed up my investigation and creation of data models for natural persons' financial transaction profiles that covers a century of living. You might imagine NO ONE has such profiles to derive the data volume generated from that so transactions, let alone the data volume of the goods and services that would be captured in X3D formats for their mirror world database! But that is exactly the tone and twist I will deliver in my 40 minute talk. Data, data, data! It's all about the data and the information technology to manage it comes second. The graphical, acoustic and haptic user interfaces to the data are implied in the phrase "information technology".

I have yet to read an article, paper, essay, book chapter, brief, etc. that describes the data generation, accumulation and correlation of individuals' non-discretionary transactions with corporations (e.g., grocers, employers, churchs, schools) and governments (e.g., County land records office, State motor vehicle administration, internal revenue service) from womb to tomb. The publications I read that discuss the services provided to clients, customers, consumers and/or citizens focus on the information technology costs, energy consumption, security, and other IT characteristics but not the data in quantitative and individualistic terms. None of the publications I've read present even a sketch of the data dynamics in quantitative terms on an illustrative diagram of the data lifecycle in the content of the service offering or the person's life span. It's like the reader (everyone) just knows the details of the data elements, formats, values, etc.

My objective speaking to what I hope to be a standing room only audience (of 75) is mobile mirror world technology like Lifegraphs are a great idea to be the information nexus between the supply, value and customer chains of e-commerce/government/health/etc.. It's an old idea depending on how close to similar ideas you consider mine. I intend to create a desire in the audience to speak up and demand lifegraph components from the parties the do business with. I hope someone in government (legislative and regulatory) will be present because this idea goes no where fast without legislated/regulated demand created at all levels of government.

There is a book entitled "Mirror Worlds" by David Gelernter that I intend to read (256pp) before the talk so I can reference it in my opening remarks. The book was written soon after I graduated from USAFA, 1991.

What's taking so long...

I've been home from Baghdad, Iraq for two months now. I haven't finished home inventory, my SysML diagrams are incomplete and I'm not clear what kind of business person or government official I should look to for help to take what appears to be a great idea of integration and invest resources into implementation. With so much "homework" to do and be available to my 9-mo old son and loving wife, it's going to be nothing less than challenging to expend the sweat labor into learning data and document-centric native XML database design, mobile edition APIs & OSes, ECMAScript, etc. to create that Blue Ocean I wrote about in my grant proposal.

I have a plan to incorporate LifeGraph Solutions LLC in the state of Maryland this month. I've been advised to do so and protect what little intellectual property I might be freely sharing with others while surveying the market. It only takes a couple hundred bucks to incorporate but the time to write the business plan and other legal documents takes more clock time than it does for me to earn that cash to file. Lucky for me, I managed three $150K 6-month Cooperative Agreements in Baghdad, Iraq that were exclusively dealing with planning Iraqi industrial operations using western styled business plans.

I do struggle with the idea of monetizing LifeGraph solutions with the consumer. I mean, I don't envision governments, corporations and citizens using their paypal account or their payment card to download LifeGraph basic or whatever version of a feature/function set. Maybe that will be a revenue stream someday. As I think about the way I want information accessed and presented to change the way and speed of my insight and investment, I foresee a need for professional services to author X3D scenes for LifeGraph software. Those who trade goods may want or their customers might demand the product in the X3D file format so it can be included in their LifeGraph. And when transactions don't have the X3D file, getting the product implemented in X3D better and faster than anyone else will generate more revenue than the competition. I wonder if I'm thinking the reinvention of accountants and bookkeepers core competencies as I write this. Since I haven't have any serious and open-minded conversations about LifeGraph Solutions with accountants or bookkeepers, I don't really think so.

I will be presenting LifeGraph Solutions to the Distric of Columbia Association of Computing Machinery (DC ACM) the first week of Jun 2009. I've accepted an invitatoin to do so as an impetus to complete a few grant related tasks I opened this post with. I joined the DC ACM recently and attended their Jan 09 program on Internet Forenics. There were 40 people in attendance for the hour-long brief at the AAAS building on New York Ave, NW. I just hope my talk attracts that many members at 7pm on a weekday before the start of summer.

11 Dec 2008 Webcast was a success

More than 50 CSC employees dialed in or logged in and listened to me for 45 minutes Thursday morning (EST) 11 Dec 2008 brief my investigation of X3D for Enterprise applications. I was in Baghdad, Iraq and most participants were from the USA. Only a few Europeans participated. I don' t know how many more CSCer's have downloaded my presentation from the Leading Edge Forum Library since the recorded event was uploaded on 12 Dec 08. I haven't received any inquiries to date:-( And I didn't steer my audience to this blog nor my portal center on the CSC portal.

I owe the LEF a technical report and that will take many more hours than the effort to pull together the brief. A lot of Enterprise Architect diagramming using the UML and SysML will fill that report. I plan to incorporate a LLC for developing Life Graph software solutions in late 2008. A software application named Debt Dog software will precede Life Graph software because the profits of it will fund the development of Life Graph. And the profits of Life Graph software are tagged to fund the development of my Web3D Laboratory for Space Traffic Management and Control research.

I shared my LEF brief with the CEO of a Singapore virtual world (mirror world) company and he wanted to know my Go-to-Market strategy for Life Graph software. I could not provide him with it because I didn't have it. After reading a few PPTs and PDFs about Go-to-market strategy, I can say I have it but haven't documented it. Basically, I will make inroads with the DC Mayor's Office, Prince George's County Executive, MD State Governor's Office and the White House on the government side, while doing the same with small, medium and large manufacturers, service providers and value-added resellers; and male and female groups that are non-working minors, working adults and non-working retirees/elderly people. The strategy is marketing to all three sides of the triangle in the cycle of life graphing (government, industry, citizenry).

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.

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.

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.