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

On 26/11/10 04:47, Andrew S. Townley wrote:
[...]
> 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.

No, I think not. "Allow" is a funny choice. Do they *prohibit*? or just
not endorse?  ISO 8879 has as its reference implementation James
Clark's sp toolkit. That's partly just because of James' reputation
I suppose but anybody that could demonstrate an application that
acted as a reference implementation could probably sell a community
to treat it as such. I don't think there's any ISO endorsement really
necessary -- it's an act of acceptance by a community, and that probably
varies by community.

>
> 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, and I think Steve Newcomb has written a few emails over
the years to this effect. It may come down to an elevator sell.

> 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.

Yup. I do think Ontopia's release of their engine has probably
had uses that we simply don't know about, as with an upcoming
project for me, I won't be able to talk about the details (though
hopefully the broad outline, we'll see). It would be great if I
could bring a project to Balisage at some point. But yes, there
are people too busy or bound by contract to be discussing or
building things publicly. I don't think being sour about that is
productive.

> 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... ;)

I've still got one project I'm hoping to explore that could go
public.

> 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.

Agreed.

> 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.

Well, it is a paradigm shift just to graph theory for a lot of
people. When one adds in the variety of new concepts in Topic
Maps it's perhaps not surprising that so few people grok even
the basics. A lot simply think it's a different syntactical
representation of RDF, just another graph markup.

And finally, yes, we continue to have a pedagogical purpose in
all of this that has never been served well by all the historical
infighting of our community.

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray10 at altheim dot com>                       ===  = =
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     = =  ===
SGML Grease Monkey, Banjo Player, Wantanabe Zen Monk               = =  = =

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