Knowledge Architecture

From Metadata to Meta Views

My work is about storytelling by time and place. Currently, I’m developing a hardware and software idea to automate the telling of stories by time and place.

We organize our lives by time and place. Time and place shape life experiences. We remember life experiences by time and place. Our virtual lives, too, can be organized by time and place, in order to better tell our stories.

We’ve outgrown our digital “desktops”. We’re drowning in data. Our document folders are proliferating. We’ve become accustomed to common file structure taxonomies and hyperlinks, but sometimes can’t find what we’re looking for, and struggle to translate data into information and knowledge. Information and knowledge are more readily accessible if we are able to read data as stories.

Let’s organize My Documents by My Stories.

If all digital media had automated and authenticated timestamps and placestamps in file metadata, we could archive and access them by time and place, enabling us to more easily weave together our recorded stories.

Digital media that can be seen, heard, read, arrayed, and aggregated by time and place (the organizing structure of our lives) tell individual and collective stories. Thus, if all globally shared digital media could be easily accessed with a few clicks, they would readily tell stories from varying points of view of all times and of all places. These interactive stories, “recorded” by any number of people, could be “composed” by any number of other people, thus expanding the meaning of “shared experiences”.

My Stories become Our Stories.

The greater vision for this storytelling idea is understanding. Patterns of events and human behaviors that are revealed by individual, local community, and global community stories from different points of view could lead to greater understandings of ourselves and others.

I’ve developed theoretical and prototypical components of my idea: a metadata-driven architecture for streaming digital media (image, sound, text, etc.) into stories. I’ve documented my work to date. Next steps include finding fellow travelers, discovering synergies with others, and developing pilot projects to explore applications of the idea.