All Over The Map

Operating systems are controlled using CLIs, Uis and in some cases applications using wire protocol. This approach has not seen much development. Recent advances in semantic technology, reasoning engines and large triple store may be the enabling technology for augmented interfaces to the OS. Commands report on state of the system and are loosely coupled, a ps command doesn’t tell you about the disk activity.  You can’t ask operating systems questions like are you busy, why are you busy. An experienced administrator can get answers to these questions by running various commands and or applications. We propose a new approach that allows the output of various commands to be linked together dynamically so that intelligent queries and or questions can be submitted. A second major example for consideration is that of describing what nominal performance is and what Dtrace script for example should be used when certain events are occurring.  This blog entry will focus on short examples and some ideas for getting the project started.