Hmm. Smart tags

This could be just the thing I’m looking for.

These beasts are a benefit of the autocorrect capabilities of Microsoft Office. When the program recognizes certain words, such as names which match your contact list in Outlook, it will pop up a discrete little button which will permit you to, say, schedule a meeting with that person, or take other actions.

Right now they are of interest because I have to reconcile a lot of information at my job. Specifically, I work at a company which helps set up cell-phone service here in LA. Each cell-tower location has different information located in different databases… it all has to match.

Hell’s bells, sometimes, it’s all I can do to figure out what the proper name of the cell-tower site is! Different organizations use different naming conventions, and they each own a different part of, or have differing responsibility over, the sites.

I’ve been thinking what a cool thing it would be to have a mondo Access database for all this… that would still be king, but I’m wondering now how much of that functionality could be provided or supplemented by a special-purpose Smart Tag outfit.

Call it Network Vocabulary… or Enwebbed Words, or whatever. I’m referring to a new kind of symbol, one that doesn’t refer to something else, but instead refers to connections between “something else’s.”

Increasingly we have to keep track of so much in our jobs and lives. The precise meaning of words change – and are changed by the activities of others. I’m thinking it could pay off to look at how computing may be used to track these changes.

It certainly would if it allows you to see that a document stating that all the enclosed sites had such and so milestone achieved this week… is, in fact, accurate, when you select the Check Milestone tab and see if they all match against the database…

Ah, sing me such a sweet lullaby!

3-Jan-04