Digital Library Initiative and The Future

Currently we are very busy digitizing humankind’s written knowledge from books to the digital so it can be made available to the world. This is a very wise move as books can decay over years and out of print books are not available to all. By digitizing the known human written knowledge to the world we can conquer the opportunity barriers of those hard chargers who may not have the resources to achieve the upward mobility they seek.

As we conquer the digital divide we will be well on our way to giving back the knowledge of the world from the entire Library of Commerce to the human race in an easy to read, search and retrieve format available to all. That will be an excellent day for the human race indeed. Recently the Discovery Channel and CSPAN have had shows that specifically address the massive undertaking; taking print in books and putting it into a digital format.

One research project of interest was funded by the NSA; the Petaplex Project was to develop a digital library scalable system of up to 20 petabytes in size. The project’s goal to have the data thru-put at a level of many millions of accesses per second with response times in sub-seconds. Imagine a digital library of the Library of Commerce able to use SuperComputer speeds to retrieve all the world’s written books online at a speed of Google. That is to say any book written in any language, anywhere in the world, at anytime, think on that for a second. One company which is working on this is Knowledge Systems which is run by a gentleman who has spent the last 22-years and whose primary work has been in hypertext and digital libraries.

As this is completed it is quite certain that it will grow into many other things, which will be digitized and searchable immediately to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Already we see Yahoo with video search and Google with picture search and this will grow. Although I personally am especially intrigued with Knowledge Systems work and the others who have joined in their vision to complete the digital library work, which will open the world of knowledge in a systematic approach that will surely change the world forever; I also feel in the future that the next generation of digital works will be awesome. For instance, I can see in the future such things as 3D, 4D, 5D digitized works, which will all be interactive and instantaneous. Then we will have brain interfaces so you can see your own thought and record dreams. We will soon have robotic manual cooperation and Virtual Reality 3D help desks all record able, replay-able and enjoyable at any time. We will literally be able to record the entire human endeavor or an entire human life, including every vision, thought, motion, feeling, dream and action. ImagineFuture might be a good name for it, as the future of images is unlimited. One might say this is way out in the future? Well, with quantum computing and mankind’s ability to dream for the future, we will eventually have Walt Disney’s vision on Steroids in our next period. A world available without a real world; a recorded, replay-able and reprogram-able world; would you like to go back and change something, an event? Well soon you maybe able to, just like Direct TV’s new feature to go back and see it again, but in the interactive digital world you can do it again, change events and make your own Virtual Reality world, think on it. Too futuristic for you; Not me!

"Lance Winslow" - If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs

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