A7TeamAwesome

A7TeamAwesome

To-Do

• describe the most important themes from the lectures for your project
• describe important themes for your project that are not discussed in any of the course lectures

describe the most important themes from the lectures for your project

Earlier, we talked about Cultures of Participation and the Authoritative and Democratic Models.  For Data Warehouses, the Model Democratic seems to directly apply. These warehouses store massive amounts of information.  Sites like YouTube and Google's 3D Model Warehouse have almost no input filters, but search options allow for output filters.  Data warehouses give new powers to the individual.  They can create and upload their own information to share with the world.

We also talked about complex systems and how software systems must evolve. This is especially true to Data Warehouses.  Depending on how people are using them, warehouses must be able to to change.  That is why sites will sometimes be down for routine maintenance and other updates.  This way the warehouses can improve how they get information to the user.

We have looked at different design methodologies.  This will give us a chance to explore each of those areas while looking at data warehouses. Some design methodologies will have realistic applications to data warehouses and others will not.  For example, participatory design made be hard to incorporate with data warehouses because the warehouses involve complex algorithms that cannot always be remade easily.

Early in the semester we discussed Distributed Cognition and the power of the collective human mind. This can be applied to data warehouses.  These warehouses are designed to store information provided by everyday people. The 3D Warehouse provides a good example of this. Other sites, like Netflix, rely on people rating their movies.  The collective Netfilx users decide weather a movie is worth seeing or not.

We have discussed Human Centered Computing in general and looking at new technology.  Technology is used as a tool for humans to better their lives. Relatively new technology like data warehouses can be used for this purpose. We use warehouses to store and make sense of the massive amount of information available to us today.

Some of the future lectures discuss a richer level of participation. We will look at Google SketchUp and the 3D Warehouse and how people partipate in that environment. People use and rate the information in data warehouses in order to further enrich the warehouse itself. New data warehouses make the user much more involved. Rather than simply using the information, they contribute to it.

A future lecture also looks at social creativity. For site like 3D Warehouse and YouTube, social creativity is essential for the success of the site. Without peoples' creative minds adding content to those sites, they would most likely fail and no one would use them.  Online environments like data warehouses provide ways for people to have other critique their work, though sometimes with meaningless inappropriate comments.

describe important themes for your project that are not discussed in any of the course lectures

One of the important design issues involving data warehouses is that the accessibility of such projects is highly related to the content that they store. We think that it is critical to analyze the relation between content and its resulting warehouse. To what extent does the nature of content shape the way users access/preview/use it? We will look the common elements of various types of content warehouses including video, image and 3D model warehouses.

Since data warehouses are such an influential aspect of modern society, it would be interesting to look at their future. We will study emerging augmented reality technologies and also look for currently unmet needs that could be fulfilled with data warehouse technology.