Re: Banging the identity drum again, this time REST-style

Hi Murray,

On 24 Nov 2010, at 1:21 AM, Murray Altheim wrote:

> On 24/11/10 07:20, Carlo Moneti wrote:
>> On 2010.11.23 08:54 Lars Heuer wrote:
> 
>> Perhaps the current community could work on defining such a
>> specification. Seems like the necessary first step to mass adoption.
> 
> Back in 2002 I cowrote a specification* that I believe provided
> the necessary functionality, and did so without any major change
> to HTML/XHTML, nor did it include non-HTML content in web pages:
> 
>    Augmented Metadata in XHTML
>    Neocortext.Net Working Draft 10 May 2002
>    Murray Altheim, Sean Palmer
>    http://www.altheim.com/specs/meta/NOTE-xhtml-augmeta.html
>    http://tinyurl.com/augmeta
> 
> ...though I hold out little hope that at this point anyone would
> do something so simple. It's a shame HTML 5 doesn't help in this
> regard.

I hadn't seen this spec, but it's a pity that it wasn't more widely publicized.  It is elegant in its simplicity and re-use of the existing vocabulary in backward/forward compatible ways.  This is very much in the spirit of what I was suggesting with the link tag.

Thanks for the pointer! :)

> While there is little to no evidence to suggest it, some people
> continue to feel that inserting complicated XML markup into web
> pages is a more likely bet, so I leave them to that exercise. The
> one area that we can continue to productively develop is the
> groundwork of PSIs/URLs behind the implementation(s) in markup,
> how those PSIs are created, what they mean (i.e., both logically
> and epistemologically), how they interrelate, how they can be
> surfaced as web services, etc.  There's still plenty of room for
> interesting and valuable work.

Couldn't agree more!

> One of the things missing in a lot of communities is an open
> source reference implementation of the primary specifications.
> We almost had that with tm4j and perhaps are approaching that
> with Ontopia (though that is a commercial product). Building
> a reference implementation around the Augmented Metadata spec
> (or something similar) would be trivial, indeed, would hardly
> be more than an hour's work. The bigger question is: would
> anyone use it? What would it take for the network effect to
> take hold?


I hadn't realized this before, but I just saw a recent post to xml-dev[1] which, in the words of Rick Jelliffe, states:

	"ISO officially does not allow reference implementations"

Perhaps this is an issue, or perhaps not.

To your second question "what would it take for the network effect to take hold?":

I think the answer here is also what prompted me starting the original thread in the first place.  We have to connect what we know about applying, categorizing and organizing information at a meta-data level and externally to existing information resources with the large, active, prolific and verbal development communities actively engaged in developing real-world solutions to current business problems.  Most of the latter haven't really ever encountered the former, so they aren't going to necessarily appreciate the benefits that this approach can have.

I agree that a reference implementation of this kind of application would be useful, but anything other than a very trivial example would

	a) be a legitimate proprietary business advantage for someone in the domain and

	b) take a good bit of time and effort for people to develop.

I think these two issues are also why repeated calls for examples of "real" topic maps implementations have yet to materialize.  There's really only a handful of people who could do anything meaningful, and they're already very busy doing their own things.

I have some ideas to explore on my own in this space, but they aren't getting a lot of personal CPU cycles based on what I'm trying to do by the end of the year either.  I don't think I'm alone with this, somehow... ;)

Unless we actively try to increase the size of the community and pull in new people and more collective bandwidth to tackle some of these projects, I think we're stuck in a Catch-22 style problem.  This will also take some time.

As Yoda says, "You must unlearn what you have learned."  Letting go of some pretty fundamental software development "truths" seems to me to be necessary to really "get" Topic Maps.  Unless we can show why this painful process is actually worth the effort, only a few brave (or, in my case, foolish) souls will dare start the journey.

Cheers,

ast

[1] http://www.stylusstudio.com/xmldev/201011/post40140.html
--
Andrew S. Townley <[email protected]>
http://atownley.org