@duncan-cragg Since, you have prompted me privately, I have been going over your Object Network write-ups as best as I can. The general ideas are very similar, which is not that surprising. What is surprising is how few people think this way, given these ideas have much history behind them.
there’s no applications, right?
Right! (Sticking to 2D spaces) Views that can invoke subviews (and so on), based on how deep you want tranclude content from linked up resources.
Just a workspace for accessing stuff?
Yes, for now. (To use your words: “The App Killer”).
An oversight on my part is to not think about multiple workspaces where, say, one shows some transcluded content and another shows the content in the original context. After reading Nelson, it seems an obvious thing to allow for.
And that stuff is adjacent to Linked Data, as in, it’s linked-up data…
Yes. (I very much like the phrase “linked-up” data).
Since I am using Solid for online storage, I am stuck with its container model, which I am trying to remedy. There is also interest in using RDF linked data. But given that I allow data models to be setup independent of resources, you could conceivably use another link-up scheme.
Also, there’s data update propagation…
Again yes! After every resource is fetched, a watcher is setup for updates, If an update is signalled, rethe resources refetched. So if an author changes a resource, other readers see the same update. If links change, the branch will repopulate.
For online storage, this uses the Solid Notifications Protocol (though I am using an extremely old version). I am also proposing an extension to HTTP called PREP to allow fetch and watch to happen with one request (These are the only update protocols we know of that have some form of content negotiation for updates). Eventually notifications might be CRDTs (extending them for any media-type is non-trivial but there are proposals), so notifications/auto-refetch it is for now.
Our approaches are conceptually similar, but where I think we might differ is that I am trying to work a lot more with existing infrastructure:
My attempt has been to build over existing protocols, and my eventual idea is to abstract over them. So it does not matter whether data is available via the file system or HTTP (or some ICN style protocol in the future). My bias here is to not presume too much about making communication protocols from scratch, because I can see that a lot of thought has gone into them. Also, getting folks interested in adopting a new protocol is harder than moving mountains.
Similarly, I allow the possibilities of different data models being constructed for the different data types/media-types/formats (actually this is the only place I cheat a bit in the present prototype, I just build all the possible data models at once but still using independent plugins to load them, something I would promptly remedy in a redesign). In principle, I can simultaneously support RDF and ONF with the right data-model plugins.
Also, we (read: some contributors to Solid) are currently working on drafting a proposal for Malleable Software with Solid/RDF and will be posting it on the forum here for feedback, hopefully soon.