It is the beginning of July and we are just about to launch DAD – so what is it and what is our vision?

As you have access to ever more technology, you probably create and consume increasing volumes of digital ‘stuff’ – photos, music, words, contact details, that sort of thing.  You use programs and web applications to enhance and share this stuff, but this causes even more disorganisation as your data is everywhere and enhancements made in one place cannot be used in another.  DAD creates a central index of all your digital stuff, bringing organisation from chaos, allowing you to view all your files.  You can then reuse enhancements and links you’ve made between your stuff in any program that is DAD aware.

All programs and web applications today create their own databases to hold your digital data and require a high degree of expertise, or tedious copy and paste type actions, to take this data from one program to another.  In our vision, all applications and web apps will either use the DAD index directly or will provide bridges to a your DAD index, so that you always have a central index of your data and any enhancements made to that data wherever the enhancements may have been created.

Once you have everything indexed and linked the uses to which it can be put are numerous.  Out of the box DAD gives you private and secure sharing capabilities – manually or automatically via its built in rules engine. You can for example have your music available on multiple computers, send photos to friends just by tagging them, synchronise photos taken on holiday in 2010 with your family to create the perfect holiday photo album or set up the perfect backup solution by sending your precious digital memories to multiple computers and devices. In fact the list of things you can get DAD to do is limited only by your imagination. We will be working with 3rd party developers, who have full access to the DAD API, to ensure there’s always something new and helpful waiting for you.

As an example: I have a photo on my computer.  I want to share that directly with some users via DAD, but also share on Facebook.  On Facebook, friends tag that photo with other friends who are in the photo and add comments.  To get all the data on that photo today I have to look at email and Facebook separately – all aspects of that photo are not linked.  With DAD and a 3rd party application linking Facebook to DAD, I can have all aspects of that photo available to me in my DAD Index to view, reuse, share as I wish.

The Semantic Web is a major initiative which will give many benefits to users across the web.  DAD is the Semantic Desktop and it is here now.