[Inquiry] Re: Arisbe -> Inquiry

[Jon Awbrey]

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EW = Elijah Wright
JA = Jon Awbrey

EW: can he dump his database out so that i can re-import it and then
    do useful things with it?  (is he working in SQL these days or what?
    or is it still wiki-text?  if he can just give me a dump of the whole
    directory, i might be able to suck it into some other system.
    it would probably break all the links, sadly...)

JA: i hope to hear more pretty soon.  incidentally, this whole business of
    maintaining a complex linkage system in portable form is one of those
    things that i began addressing in my theme-one program way.bak when.

EW: how do XML fragments and schemas take a stab
    at this ("maintaining a complex linkage system
    in portable form")?  one would think that they
    would be quite useful ...  'specially if you can
    write transforms from one flavor of data into
    another one.

I view this whole business as "applied graph theory", or a problem
about maintaining a proper relationship between the abstract defs
and the concrete imps in the domain of "dynamic data structures".
The relationship between (unlabeled) graphs and labeled graphs
is a big part of what graph theory is all about.  I used to
lurk on the TopicMap and the OpenXML lists -- the latter
mostly just because they were using Delphi/Pascal --
waiting for folks to start saying something that
I could recognize as Logic, but ...

Anyway, I gather that many JavaHeads are reluctant
to use dynamic pointer structures so I don't know
if there is much common ground there.  Not sure.

Dinner Bell ...
Rest Later ...

Jon

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JA: i called it "content addressable relative memory access" (carma),
    or "graphically abstract structure" (gas), and this came up again

EW: funny :)

JA: when jack started to talk about building desktop modules
    that you would then have to keep coordinated with each
    other and with the master/mirror copies.

EW: synchronization without intervention is Really Hard, if you don't
    have a common ground from which to evaluate two things ... that
    common ground can be as simple as "which one changed last",
    but that still can't cover all possible cases where
    changes in a system happen...

EW: i dont think i'm making sense ;)

JA: it's really just virtual copies, or even more archtypical, the theory of
    manifolds all over again.  we are yet to finish that conversation/story.

EW: hehehe

EW: a couple of my fellow students here (chris dent and kathryn labarre)
    were working on integrating 'purple numbers' into mailing list archives

JA: yes, i remember their names.  i gather that jack's notion of
    "addressable information resource" (air) is in that ballpark.

EW: i think so.

JA: that's dormitive right now --- http://www.nexist.org/wiki/
    yup, it's still sleeping ... but he says any day now ...

JA: i have been looking at my wordpad files and trying
    to think about how i might recreate something with
    this archive system that might be analogous to the
    "glossarium" that i built before at the nexist site.

EW: describe in more detail?

JA: the big catch is the lack of ability to edit stuff after you have sent it,
    and so that demands more think-ahead than i am accustomed to muster up.

EW: that's kind of a nasty thing about both email and netnews -- they're not
    particularly oriented toward version control.  mostly, people 'fake' it on
    top by settting up another layer of complexity (usually, version numbers
    of some sort).  you could probably do something like this, though it might
    be easier to come up with an interesting mail header tag that lets you
    trace changes ...  (not in the subject line -- a full X-header tag...)

JA: i can send raw source code and exe if you want to play around with it.

EW: go for it.  won't happen anytime soon, but an archival copy isn't
    a bad thing.  you could even send it to the list if you wanted ...

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