Where will it flourish....bottom up, or top down ? In other words, what comes first figuring out what to do with the data, or collecting the data?

2.6. Two Scaling Issues

The authors note that wide-scale deployment of context-aware applications will require vast arrays of sensors, widgets, interpreters, aggregators, discoverers, and services. It will involve extensive relaying of information and require the recording of comprehensive histories of activity of all components and interactions. Scaling up will raise technical issues and require higher-level abstractions.

Rapid progress is likely in addressing the technical issues. But how useful will the structure emerging from this bottom-up effort be? Consider the analogy of an ant colony, with its many basic sensors that detect water, food, temperature, other ants, threats, and so forth. The colony exhibits aggregation, interpretation, and discovery. It works beautifully. But its repertoire is quite limited, and it took millions of years of trial and error to arrive at an architecture to accomplish that much.

Top-down approaches to context problems are illustrated by the Cyc project (Lenat, 1995). Cyc, intended to be a repository of “common-sense” information and reasoning that spans all domains of knowledge, is another architecture that promotes the reuse of contextual information by diverse applications. Although Cyc has been criticized on grounds ranging from technical to ontological, its basic rationale is compelling and similar to that of the context-aware framework. Perhaps bottom-up architectures for context-aware applications that seek higher-level abstractions will merge with top-down efforts such as Cyc. But it is not clear that Cyc will deliver on its promise (originally forecast to take ten years, Cyc is almost 20 and its anticipated size has grown an order of magnitude). On the whole, partial implementations of Cyc are not useful. Will the same be true for the equally ambitious vision of context-aware applications?

I say, .....the technicals of bottom up will drive all the issues. For the multitudes that are making all the stately considerations ....it's the tinkers that get the job done. And they will not read 1/8 of all the papers published on questions.

e.Digital allows for the tinker to get going. When a lock is opened new directions take shape.

doni