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[ba-ohs-talk] new version of graph model paper posted


Ken Holman and I submitted a version of my graph model paper last week to 
Extreme Markup.  I've posted the new version on my web site:    (01)

  http://www.eekim.com/ohs/papers/graphmodel/    (02)

The paper is actually shorter than the original draft, because I didn't 
have time to clarify certain things before the submission deadline.  Don't 
worry -- those will make their way back into another version of the paper.    (03)

The major changes are with the first few sections and conclusion.  I 
barely touched the graph model examples.  I'd appreciate comments and 
suggestions.    (04)

Thanks to the great feedback I received, I think I'm nearing a conceptual 
breakthrough as to how to think about the OHS.  That's partially reflected 
in my changes, but I'll need another draft to flesh out those ideas fully.  
The breakthrough centered around the terminology difficulty I was having 
with "document" and "knowledge containers."    (05)

The term that I settled on was "hyperdocument."  (Boy, that one was just
staring at me in the face. :-)  I think the flaw with Groves and NODAL as 
a candidate data model for the OHS is that they are too document-centric 
-- NODAL less so than Groves.  They express a data model for a document, 
but depend on something external to relate data between documents.    (06)

The point I try to get across in my paper is that there is no need for 
such a distinction, and in fact, there is much to gain by not separating 
the two.  A hyperdocument, as I express it, expresses data and their 
relationships with each other.  Documents are simply two-dimensional views 
of a hyperdocument.    (07)

For example, suppose you have an article with annotations.  Are these
two separate documents?  They could certainly be viewed that way.  But 
they also could be viewed as a single document.  Should they be stored in 
two separate files?  That's the wrong way to think about things -- it's 
what Ted Nelson calls the tyranny of the file.  Think of an article with 
annotations as a hyperdocument, and all of the possible two-dimensional 
views as documents.    (08)

Other changes I plan on making: Alex Shapiro expressed disappointment that 
I chose threaded documents as my example, as opposed to something more 
graph-oriented like Wiki.  I plan on doing a Wiki example, and showing how 
the data model for Lucid Fried Eggs is essentially the same as the Wiki 
data model, except with some additional link types.    (09)

-Eugene    (010)

-- 
+=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
|       "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they        |
+=====  can have an excuse to drink alcohol."  --Steve Martin  ===========+    (011)