[INFOD-WG] Draft INFOD Elevator Pitch

[Shankar, Mallikarjun]

Here is a draft of a pitch that we may want to give our
friendly neighborhood sponsors (funders, 
investors, patrons, etc..) as we run into them in a lobby or 
while riding up an elevator.

Am intentionally using the symmetric 
terms publisher and subscriber, producer and consumer,
and source and destination somewhat interchangeably.

Comments and edits (both major and minor) welcome. 

-Arjun


Suppose you need to be able to channel the flow of data 
from thousands of sources to thousands of destinations flexibly.
You need this for applications such as alerting (e.g., for stock
tickers,
or threat/monitoring sensors and actuators), simply matching buyers and
sellers
in a retail situation, etc..
You need a system that allows a dynamic way to match the
sources and destinations of the streaming data in a flexible manner -
without
being too limiting in how you enforce the match (in terms of
choice of languages for expressing constraints or necessarily specifying

precise sources or destinations).
INFOD lets publishers and subscribers of information advertise
their requirements and capabilities with their own data-vocabularies,
and
it helps match them - INFOD thus ends up creating the plumbing for
communities
of interest based on types of content.
In addition, you need a way to react dynamically as the condition
or state of the producers and consumers of data changes.
INFOD takes into account such situations;  most existing
systems do not support this.
INFOD tells the sources where to send and
how to filter information for a particular destination, and the sources
and destinations communicate directly with each other. 
Indirectly, this leads to the subscriber determining what
constitutes events at the publisher and which messages
should be created in response to these events.
(The publishers may do intricate processing on these event 
message streams before sending messages to the consumers.)
The vision is to tailor content flow and achieve context 
aware delivery of "Valued Information at the Right Time".