Re: [ba-ohs-talk] Hyperscope and Launch plan - Doug's own words
James Michael DuPont wrote: (01)
>>1. Tying it to current technologies in some way - it
>>is a
>>functional spec - we would need to pick out
>>promising components out
>>that as initial starting points
>
> I really like the touchgraph and would like to use it
> personally as a basis for a next generation browser,
> that and a callback handler for emacs and editing and
> the ability to plug in new node generators and xrefs
> systems.
>
> Added in a huge postgres database with all the nodes
> store in there.
>
> What do you think? (02)
If you switch out the postgres database for Xindice and focus
on authoring rather than browsing (though I don't differentiate
the latter over the former given that authors regularly "browse"
their own research materials and produced texts), then what
you're describing is essentially what I'm working on with Ceryle,
the project component of my Ph.D. program. This will be released
into open source as the code and documentation stabilizes and
becomes minimally functional for the tasks it was intended. It
currently includes a TouchGraph implementation that displays
topic map views of content. It's finalizing this latter component
that is the next step. I'm just working on an Augmented Plain
Text (APT) processor [1], which enables authoring of web documents
from plain text sources. (03)
Now, I would mention that Ceryle is not intended to be a
Hyperscope, in that while it can import plain text, HTML/XHTML
and several other XML formats, I have no intention of importing
Microsoft documents. Eliot Kimber's last big project did this,
was installed in the State of Texas (can't remember which gov't
department), and he demoed it last year. If you guys are really
serious about a Hyperscope and want to take advantage of current
work, I would contact Eliot. He's got 90% of the work you need
already done, AFAIK. I think he and Lee Iverson have talked about
this, though I'm not sure what's happened there. (04)
Murray (05)
[1] http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/ceryle/docs/NOTE-apt1.html
......................................................................
Murray Altheim <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK (06)
In the evening
The rice leaves in the garden
Rustle in the autumn wind
That blows through my reed hut. -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu (07)