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Re: [ba-ohs-talk] Emergence, REST, and purple numbers


I should have added that McCrone very much DISconnects software from
brains, hence caution advised.    (01)

Henry    (02)

Mark Szpakowski wrote:    (03)

> There's an interview on oreillynet with Steven Johnson, author of
> "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software",
> about bottom-up organization of complex systems, that's just chock full
> of riches:
> http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a//network/2002/02/22/johnson.html.
>
> How do I do a look up to see if this book has already been recommended
> in this conversation?
>
> There is some dissing of the book by readers on Amazon.
>
> Here's one connection to the Augment discussion. In the interview:
> "Our frontal lobes differ dramatically from those of the other primates.
> It's disproportionately large, and one of the things that happens there
> is all the different specialized data processing going on through the
> rest of the brain gets brought there and kind of synthesized -- what's
> going on in the visual cortex, the audio realm, the emotional realm. All
> that stuff is brought together.
>
> I was thinking that what the Web needs is a big neo-cortex. There are
> all these very specialized smart, focused tools being developed, and
> data that's being mined, and collective intelligence on specific
> problems. But we're not as good yet at, not just filtering all that
> stuff, but figuring out what belongs connected to what else. Google is,
> in a way, the beginning of that. It's letting the Web solve that pattern
> itself, looking at patterns and links of what should be connected to
> other things. But we need more of that kind of synthesis going on. I
> think XML is going to be a great platform for that. Once you have clear,
> simple markup for describing big chunks of data, it should be easier to
> do that as well.
>
> Sims. And it offers the potential of two-way linking.
>
> Johnson. Yeah, two-way linking is kind of essential to letting the Web
> evolve in an organic way."
>
> My understanding is that purple numbers provide an easy way for a reader
> of a paragraph (to be specific, of a paragraph that is web-addressable
> (has a URI)) to make a link directly to that paragraph (by doing a "Copy
> Link" on the purple number).
>
> So this starts making it easier to create "links-to". Not quite two-way
> links, but at least closes the cycle:
> - you go to some chunkable piece with a URI (and a quick and dirty for
> chunkable is anything that makes sense to be inside a <p> ... </p> tab);
> - you easily harvest the URI into some info-ecology of your own.
>
> This echoes the suggestion made in Paul Prescod's article on REST
> (http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/02/20/rest.html), where a key "aha" came
> from:
> "A balkanized way of submitting a purchase order is to call an RPC
> end-point which returns a corporation-specific purchase order identifier
> (even a UUID). A universally addressable way is to ask the server to
> generate a new location (using POST) where the purchase order can be
> uploaded (using PUT)."
>
> So the key is two-fold web addressability: read and write! Easily plop
> and populate new web addresses: write the web! If you start thinking of
> resources in a uri-centric fashion, then the key thing is to be able to
> _create_ URIs.
>
> The cosmology is: there is nothing but URI's. You can get URI's, and you
> can plop new URI's.
>
> Purple numbers help you grab web addresses. That's the first, still
> incomplete step in web addressability: you need to be able to get the
> address. But then you also need to be able to put that address (and
> probably some meta-info) somewhere, and not just anywhere, but somewhere
> that's addressable.  You still need to be able to _write_ purple numbers
> somewhere (and easily!).
>
> How will the paragraphs in this e-mail of mine get purple numbers?
> Within bootstrap.org's archiving of this message they should (although
> that doesn't seem to be the case yet, after doing a quick check of the
> archive). More generally, though? I suppose paragraphs to XML, then XSLT
> to lay a fragment identifier and purple number interface (for rapid
> copying of the URI) on each paragraph. We tend to write in editors, so
> that's something an editor could do (Save As Purple XML...).
>
> In terms of ABCs, is furthering something like this in the realm of "B
> activity" (improving a process) and maybe "C activity" (improving the
> improving process)?
>
> Cheers,
> Mark    (04)