Questions have arisen recently about the morality of Santa’s List itself. To many parents, misbehaving children aren’t ever Naughty. Pulling the legs off that spider isn’t Naughty, it’s a child exploring the world around him. Running wildly around the tables at the restaurant isn’t Naughty, it’s a healthy expression of childhood exuberance. to be constrained by ethical norms is stifling, and tying gifts from Santa to one’s adherence to these norms is emotional blackmail. Nevertheless, his is a usa rcs data private, non-governmental, volunteer enterprise. His rules. It was mentioned, though, that the staff allocated to customer service and claims has increased significantly in the past generation.
Clearly the Event Collection and Evaluation process is highly distributed and occurs at the edge. There’s no reason to consolidate either the data or the processing. When an event is characterized as Naughty or Nice, it is wrapped up (with a bow) and delivered to a regional repository.
Classification Aggregation and Prediction
The ultimate deliverable is, of course, Santa’s List, with data from the regional repositories aggregated into a single binary result for each individual.
Consolidating the data from the multiple edge nodes seemed to me to pose a significant master data management challenge: specifically, matching events at different times and places with the correct individuals. An entire industry has emerged around recognizing when Bill Jones and William Jones are the same person. Not a problem, I was told, because events are associated with inherent characteristics of the person. Fingerprints, earlobe shape, or retina print maybe? Maybe. Trade secret.