Aspect Oriented Information?

My last post was on languages for handling information.  As I considered further, perhaps we can lean on some work in the computer languages with respect to aspect oriented programming…

 

AOP provides facilities for what are called crosscutting concerns – these are concerns that cross more than one ‘module’.  Things such as security, transaction integrity, and logging generally fall into this camp.  Are there similar concerns in information management that can be extracted from the information itself and handled as aspects of the information?

 

Perhaps…some examples might be:

 

-          access control

-          creation time

-          author

-          reliability

-          recency

 

As such, the information can be treated as a stream and the ‘aspects’ can be injected/tested/verified/etc. as an aspect of the information rather than muddying up the information stream itself.  Would this help?  I think in some cases it would…as part of my query, I offer up my ‘aspect parameters’ as well as my ‘information parameters’.  Or, this could be done as a second level filter on the returned information (except for the access control part of the query).

 

To some extent, existing search engines do this on our behalf – they sort by recency, relevancy, etc. and some base their results on your own personal track record.  Can I have more control over this?  Would it make sense?  How would you implement it, or does this truly reside in the information gatherer/disseminators such as Google?  Can the information providers/producers provide better indications of the information that can be leveraged by other tools downstream?

 

To this last, I believe the answer is yes – there is a lot of information lossage along the way from producer to consumer, and we can do better.

 

Kipp