In message <4.2.2.20010523101903.00b8f280@thinkalong.com>, Jack Park writes:
> [some deleted]
>
>On top of that, Ted talks about Xanalogical Media, which includes something
>called a Virtual File. Now, we are strongly reminded of Topic Maps and
>Steve Newcomb's lectures that everything in the way of references and links
>should reside *above* the information resource. That, if nothing else,
>describes Ted Nelson's Virtual File. I believe that I have read somewhere
>that word processors do something like this when one opens a document for
>edit: a temp file is created complete with links that, during the save
>operation, allow merging temp with the main document. After listening to
>Ted, heck, why not do everything that way in the first place.
>
>BTW: my understanding of Douglas Engelbart's Augment system informs me that
>Augment "files" do precisely the same thing.
>
>An advantage, as advertised, is this: you now only need one copy of any
>given item in an information resource universe. You just wire these
>objects together in a virtual file and *presto!* you've got document, mail,
>whatever.
>
>So, what happens if one simply begins to construct all documents with
>virtual file systems, and, um, suppose the virtual file system were to
>implement XTM documents. One wonders just what levels of searchability,
>readibility, and so forth (not to mention, disk space requirement) one
>could achieve by this subtle shift in action.
I believe that there is a problem here. I don't believe Ted "gets"
the shifts in understanding that have taken place in moving from SGML
and HTML to XML. In almost all circumstances, embedded tags are now
(reading the most-enlightened XML literature) considered to be
semantic type identifiers. XML is now painted as a document-oriented
data modelling language. The fact that it is not very good at this
particular job is generally glossed over. As Eric has pointed out
many times, the real "problem" is not embedded tags per-se, but mixed
content, in which you don't know whether you're going to get text or a
tag as the next item (ick), and in which you are mixing semantic tags
with formatting tags (double ick).
>DocBook would nolonger be comprised of imbedded tags. Rather, it would be
>an "above the document" series of URIs into a rich information
>space. Parsable as a DocBook document, but now, given the ability to let
>the URIs (tumblers?) pass through a grove engine, one now has the
>capability of universal multimedia document generation, complete with
>reusable components.
I'm with you entirely on this one. Another way of phrasing it would
be to suggest that we have a soup of completely reusable components
(nodes) which are organized using a small number of very simple
primitives into an arbitrarily interconnected graph of nodes.
Edges in the graph may be references to either local or remote
objects, as long as every potential object has an easily derived
external address (a URI). Information objects are then delivered
outside the system by serializing views (Doug's term, the same as
Ted's virtual file) using a variety of serialization algorithms each
of which corresponds to some external document format (e.g. HTML, MS
Word, GIF and JPEG images, ...). These documents only actually exist
as serializations produced from various views of the interconnected
node databases. Sounds like NODAL!
>Of course, one needs a mechanism to view (and edit) such an enormous,
>heterogeneous information space. Ted gave a great demonstration of his
>ZigZag technology that allows individual information-bearing nodes to be
>wired together, just as beads on a string, and wired into as many
>dimensions of information one wishes. One node, many views. An open
>source version of ZigZag is available at http://gzigzag.sourceforge.net. I
>am persuaded to suspect that an application of the ZigZag idea merits
>consideration in just about any knowledge project in which one might be
>involved, including Doug Engelbart's own Open Hyperdocument System
>(http://www.bootstrap.org).
I wasn't particularly impressed with ZigZag, since it didn't seem to
give me anything that I couldn't get with generic (and
well-understood!) graph structures and algorithms. Ted's search for
"revolutionary" data structures seems to be too much of a barrier for
most programmers, let alone the users of his systems.
>Boggles the mind to think that Ted Nelson, Doug Engelbart, and very few
>others have seen the universe this way and it has been largely ignored. I
>am thinking that the *above the information* paradigm rediscovered by
>Newcomb, Biezunsky, and others needs an even closer look.
I'm not entirely convinced that all structure wants to be "above the
information" . I'd suggest that useful information has inherent
structure. The real issue is the flexibility of the structural
building blocks and the ability to reference and reuse this structured
information with a variety of higher-level structures. In order to
reuse a birthday, I want to maintain the fact that it is So-and-so's
birthday, no matter what the context that nugget is being used in.
So, with your permission, I'd say that the real failure of current
systems is that the only level of reusable structure "above the
information" is the document. That is just way too coarse.
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