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Meme Media and Knowledge Federation:
Past, Present, and Future
Yuzuru Tanaka
Meme Media Laboratory, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
tanaka@meme.hokudai.ac.jp
Abstract.
This paper gives a historical survey of our meme media research
since 1987. Its origin was the idea of the synthetic media architecture. Then in
1993 came the reorientation of the architecture toward the meme media
architecture, focusing on the international sharing, reediting, and redistribution
of various knowledge resources. This was followed by our efforts to merge the
meme media architecture with Web technologies, and made us come across a
new aspect of meme media technologies, i.e., knowledge federation which
focuses on how to enable people to extract arbitrary functions from open Web
applications and/or Web services and to make them interoperate with each other
for improvisational composition of a complex application from available open
Web resources. Finally, this paper gives future perspectives on meme media in
the context of cloud computing and exploratory big data analytics.
Keywords.
Meme Media, Knowledge Federation, Synthetic Media, Meme
Pool, Web Resources.
1
Introduction
The history of meme media research started with an idea of the synthetic media
architecture IntelligentPad in 1987 and its implementation in Smalltalk 80 in 1989 [1].
Then the IntelligentPad Consortium was organized by major IT companies including
Fujitsu, Hitachi Software Engineering, Fuji Xerox, NTT, and NEC in 1993. In this
year we had TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) Conference in Kobe,
where we reoriented our media architecture to meme media and meme pool
architectures [2][3], and showed its live-demonstration. The dissemination of Web
browsers after 1995 made us consider how to use the Web as a world-wide meme
pool, i.e., a repository of meme media objects. Around the same time, consortium
member companies released commercial versions of IntelligentPad developed in C++.
Then we came across the problem of how to wrap a Web resource like Web
applications or Web services into a meme media object. Once being wrapped, such
resources can be easily combined together to interoperate with each other. This idea
opened a new vista of knowledge federation, especially improvisational knowledge
federation, i.e., dynamic federation of knowledge resources over the Web [4]. This
idea, however, required two different system environments, i.e., the Web environment
and a meme media system environment. An ideal solution to avoid the use of more
