SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture. Services can be assembled together to form news (composed) services. Most of the time this terminology is used in the back-end. The same way, but then more on the user interface side (the front-end), we talk about mash-ups, which is in essence a service oriented componentization of the user-interface, where one can combine (mash-up) different information sources into new user experiences.

In interesting article in the breakthrough section of Forbes online makes a similar “SOA” like metaphor for the human brains.

Michael Anderson talks about the “Brain Economy” and how Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) lets us delve deeper into the workings of the cortex.

Psychology generally approaches the study of the mind by starting with behavior, and trying to infer the hidden mechanisms that produce it.

Neuroscience, in contrast, begins by examining the smallest, deepest parts of the mechanism–genes and neurons–and tries to determine which behaviors these help produce.

DTI allows you to see where nerve fibers lead and to map the fiber bundles wiring together various parts of the cortex. Such a map is called a

connectome.

 

The brain has just such an economy, where the raw materials of perception are gathered, processed, transformed and distributed in accordance with the dictates of a complex network of business and consumer relations. The brain’s transportation and distribution network is the connectome. Combining information on activity and information about the topographic features of this network gives us our most powerful tool yet to pinpoint what this mental economy produces and how it does it.

Compared to IT SOA, the connectome is like the information “bus”, containing connectors and adaptors to the different underlying components of brain functions. The semantic backbone of such connectomes makes it possible to make sense out of structured and non-structured information. By combining these information, we create “mask-ups” and new data patterns.

The human mind is great at pattern recognition, and relatively poor when it comes to pure processing power (at least compared to what your average PC/Mac can do, and certainly to what your average PC/Mac will be able to do in 20 years from now).

With the emergence of powerful semantic tagging engines and pattern recognition software,

we are entering a new era of the

Global Brain

 

What does all this mean for the sciences of the mind? It likely means that the brain isn’t organized quite the way we once thought, with each area dedicated to specialized cognitive domains like vision, language and decision-making.

Rather, just as in a real economy, the output of each factory is used in distinctive ways that depend on who the business partners or consumers are. In the brain, too, every local product is put to many uses, and so patterns of cooperation between "producers" and "consumers" govern cognitive outcomes. Our intelligence is largely powered by borrowing and re-organizing our existing resources to deal with ever-changing situations.

In a service oriented marketplace, the “producers” are called the “service providers” and the “consumers” are called the “service consumers”.

This is a lot of similarities to be a co-incidence. In this new hype of semantic web, we are seeing this a lot of modeling techniques and conventions that we’ve seen 25 years ago when people started talking seriously about relational databases and object oriented programming.

It looks like this time it’s going to be made real. In my opinion because we now have true distributed architectures and clouds, because we have now this massive computing, search and semantic power from Google, AWS, Microsoft, Apple, etc.

A Global Mind coming true. Such a big trend that most of use just don’t see the trend.