@ftrain Hahaha. Run from the data structures or the Ted Nelson's crazy quest for Xanadu? I Googled "XANADU FAILURE" to find this epic 27 page Wired article from a few years back that I just finished reading (http://www.wired.com/wired...). I had no idea the project had such an intense/tumultuous/failed history, it's totally the most flawed and fascinating thing ever.
"I stared hard at Gregory's books. A hundred years ago, with only the products of the printing press to aid them, the Britannica encyclopedists built a collection of information that, while incomplete, convincingly pointed the way toward total knowledge. Today, with the advent of far more powerful memory devices, Xanadu, the grandest encyclopedic project of our era, seemed not only a failure but an actual symptom of madness"
Imagining a continuum with an unstructured-ish model like the Internet as we know it one one side and super-linked Xanadu insanity™ on the other, I feel like there's still important work to be done pushing towards the semantic/linked-data side. Trying to fit everything ever into that model seems like a really bad idea, though. If the biggest problems—the project's impossibly large scope (everything ever), the fact that they never shipped it, and that they didn't put enough work into a usable front-end—could be solved, doesn't it actually seem like it would be really useful within smaller communities?
"I stared hard at Gregory's books. A hundred years ago, with only the products of the printing press to aid them, the Britannica encyclopedists built a collection of information that, while incomplete, convincingly pointed the way toward total knowledge. Today, with the advent of far more powerful memory devices, Xanadu, the grandest encyclopedic project of our era, seemed not only a failure but an actual symptom of madness"
Imagining a continuum with an unstructured-ish model like the Internet as we know it one one side and super-linked Xanadu insanity™ on the other, I feel like there's still important work to be done pushing towards the semantic/linked-data side. Trying to fit everything ever into that model seems like a really bad idea, though. If the biggest problems—the project's impossibly large scope (everything ever), the fact that they never shipped it, and that they didn't put enough work into a usable front-end—could be solved, doesn't it actually seem like it would be really useful within smaller communities?
There are too many standards that have become stranded. Strandards. XLink! OWL2! Beware utopia and think of the users.