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While most of us have been binge-streaming or strapping computers to our bodies or wrapping our heads around the ins and outs of net neutrality, an international team of academics and some of the world's biggest technology companies have been quietly pondering how to rewrite the basic structure of the internet—for our sakes.
Their idea sounds simple: instead of numbers, use names. Focus not on the locations of things, but on the things themselves.
The proposal, called Named Data Networking, shifts the focus from the numbered locations of data—IP addresses like 174.16.254.1—to the very names of data—something like motherboard/stories/NDN/photo1. Under this system, for example, when your computer makes a packet request for a new Netflix release, you could retrieve the video from the nearest computer that has it, rather than wait to get it from Netflix's heavily-trafficked centralized servers.
"As far as the network is concerned," the project's website says, "the name in an NDN packet can be anything: an endpoint, a chunk of movie or book, a command to turn on some lights, etc." An internet not of numbers, but, if you will, of things.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-internet-of-names
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking
(Score: 5, Informative) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday May 04 2015, @09:06PM
Wow, seeing "something like motherboard/stories/NDN/photo1" takes me back to IMS, the non-relational, hierarchical database that predates relational databases. You do not want to go back to that mess. It's hard to mentally process these paths through data. You also don't always want to take the same path to a node, which leads to alternate indexes and other horrors. There's a reason why everyone on the planet moved to SQL databases as soon as they could and left this stuff behind. (IMS is still very widely used because of its historical installed base, which can't justify migrating off of it.) That's one of the big troubles with age discrimination. Anyone who has ever seen IMS would tell you this hierarchical structure is not a good idea. This is a wheel you don't want to reinvent.
No matter how you organize your data, you always want to access it another way.
internet://anger/hate/fear
internet://hate/anger/fear
internet://fear/anger/hate
internet://anger/fear/hate
etc
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday May 05 2015, @07:57AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves