About four years ago I interviewed Ray Kurzweil, and asked him about the issue of old data formats. In Singularity or one of his earlier papers or books, he had lamented the inaccessibility of old data, which prompted me to ask about the role of standards. His response:
We do use standard formats, and the standard formats are continually changed, and the formats are not always backwards compatible. It's a nice goal, but it actually doesn't work.
I have in fact electronic information that in fact goes back through many different computer systems. Some of it now I cannot access. In theory I could, or with enough effort, find people to decipher it, but it's not readily accessible. The more backwards you go, the more of a challenge it becomes.
And despite the goal of maintaining standards, or maintaining forward compatibility, or backwards compatibility, it doesn't really work out that way. Maybe we will improve that. Hard documents are actually the easiest to access. Fairly crude technologies like microfilm or microfiche which basically has documents are very easy to access.
So ironically, the most primitive formats are the ones that are easiest.
So something like acrobat documents, which are basically trying to preserve a flat document, is actually a pretty good format, and is likely to last a pretty long time. But I am not confident that these standards will remain. I think the philosophical implication is that we have to really care about knowledge. If we care about knowledge it will be preserved. And this is true knowledge in general, because knowledge is not just information. Because each generation is preserving the knowledge it cares about and of course a lot of that knowledge is preserved from earlier times, but we have to sort of re-synthesize it and re-understand it, and appreciate it anew.
Related thought: The "Rosetta Project" (http://rosettaproject.org/) aims to build a publicly accessible library of human languages. Besides the website, part of the original concept was to seed the world with "Rosetta Discs", metal spheres with an approximately 2,000-year lifespan, etched with optically readable samples of thousands of written languages. Future humans who found the discs would be able to review and understand the dead languages on it as long as at least one of the languages on the disk was still known. The website (http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/) describes how it would work:
The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’
On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).
I like the way the disk begins in eye-readable scale and tapers down. But why not continue this even further? At some point, when enough exposition has been done so that the corpus is fairly understandable, you could then introduce the concept of binary encoding. And then after a few short examples and mappings, then continue the rest of the disc in binary form.
One could theoretically take this further by then explaining how we built our primitive computers, some simple math, and continue.
I would love an accompanying Rosetta project that was in just one language, but exposited our understandings of math, physics and computer science so that some civilization that discovered the twin discs could use the first one to learn English (as long as they knew or could decipher at least one of the languages) and the second one to reconstruct our understanding of math, physics and computer science and rebuild a 2000 AD era computer, and finally input to it a tar.gz dump of all of Wikipedia.
We do use standard formats, and the standard formats are continually changed, and the formats are not always backwards compatible. It's a nice goal, but it actually doesn't work.
I have in fact electronic information that in fact goes back through many different computer systems. Some of it now I cannot access. In theory I could, or with enough effort, find people to decipher it, but it's not readily accessible. The more backwards you go, the more of a challenge it becomes.
And despite the goal of maintaining standards, or maintaining forward compatibility, or backwards compatibility, it doesn't really work out that way. Maybe we will improve that. Hard documents are actually the easiest to access. Fairly crude technologies like microfilm or microfiche which basically has documents are very easy to access.
So ironically, the most primitive formats are the ones that are easiest.
So something like acrobat documents, which are basically trying to preserve a flat document, is actually a pretty good format, and is likely to last a pretty long time. But I am not confident that these standards will remain. I think the philosophical implication is that we have to really care about knowledge. If we care about knowledge it will be preserved. And this is true knowledge in general, because knowledge is not just information. Because each generation is preserving the knowledge it cares about and of course a lot of that knowledge is preserved from earlier times, but we have to sort of re-synthesize it and re-understand it, and appreciate it anew.
Source:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_kurzweil_interview_contin...