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Subject: RE: [xtm-wg] Structural subspecification "simple as a spreadsheet "
This feels very familiar - back to Leibniz & beyond, folks have struck on "simple frameworks" for organizing all knowledge, which can strike like bolts of enlightenment (yes, I've been afflicted myself...). Trouble is, they are usually only actually useful in problem-classes very like whatever is pressing for solution by the "enlightened" at that time.... Sorry to appear cynical, but I do think that Topic Maps as they are (the concept, NOT the 13250 syntax) are about as simple as you can get & still be really useful. The implementation can be simplified, sure - which is part of what XTM is about - and the abstract model could be implemented in other ways, too, eg using spreadsheets (I think the generic spreadsheet concept would be a nice exercise in defining a public subject with non-trivial embedded structure, btw). You can also do a lot to make it simpler by hiding some of the intermediate layers in notation (I recently contributed some ideas), and by collapsing some commonly used concepts into "public" stuff to use by reference. Much better to gain simplicity that way, with a well-founded underpinning. Sceptically yours... Ann W. -----Original Message----- From: Andrius Kulikauskas [mailto:ms@ms.lt] Sent: 19 July 2000 00:10 To: xtm-wg@egroups.com Subject: [xtm-wg] Structural subspecification "simple as a spreadsheet" Hi, I would like to gauge what interest there might be in an extremely simple format for aggregates of thoughts (a thought might typically be a note, but also an image, code, data, file, etc.) The purpose of the format is to facilitate the purposeful import/export of aggregates of notes between tools for organizing thoughts, such as www.thebrain.com, www.mindmanager.com, http://thoughtstream.org, www.memes.net, www.multicentric.com, but also Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, etc. The format is a single six-column table that could be manipulated with a spreadsheet program like Excel. It is a very simplified form of TopicMaps, perhaps - a bastardized form, so I am curious for whom else it might be useful. Each record in the table is understood to be a thought. The order of the records, in general, does not matter. The six fields are: ID, FromID, ToID, Intent, Prompt, Content. The purpose of the format is for conceptual modeling, so the fields can be defined quite loosely, and well formedness is not an issue. For example, any or all of the fields might be null, including the identifiers, and the identifiers need not be unique. The model helps an author and assisting programmer transfer records (thoughts) from one software environment to another, by making explicit the following constraints: 1) The author distinguishes, for each thought, between the prompt and the content. The prompt is what for the author evokes the content, but is not the content. The content is that which holds the attention of the author. Tools for organizing thoughts typically use the prompt to facilitate visualization. [In Topic Maps, a "thought" is a topic, a "prompt" is a name, and a "content" is an occurrence. Here there is the restriction that there can be only one name and one occurrence per topic. Also, the occurrence is kept with (or "in") the topic, because the author by definition has authority to write.] 2) A relationship (or link) between thoughts consists of three thoughts: modeling (correctly or not) that our mental state moves from A to B by means of C. Also: every thought "ID" is taken to be a relationship from "FromID" to "ToID" where the latter may both be possibly null, (in which case we have a node). This is in the spirit of the mathematician Von Neumann, who suggested that instructions are data and should not be stored separately within computers. More importantly, a thought that we take to be only a node, may always turn out to be a relationship between two other thoughts, and still be a thought. [Here a "relationship (or link)" is an association. This violates the spirit and letter of topic maps, where it is important that associations are not topics, so as to distinguish the annotator and the author. However, if an author is looking at their own web of thoughts, it seems strange to force such a dichotomy upon them.] 3) The intent of the relationship is recorded by a structural link type, such as: S = step in a sequence, H = branch in a hierarchy, DN = link in a directed network, NN = link in a nondirected network, and so on, for all of the structural link types that we are able to find in use. These are simply the local intents of the author, and need not hold globally, so that an author may intend to link some of her thoughts into a sequence, but she may not be finished, so that there are only segments. Or the links may have inadvertently formed a circle. Validity is not an issue (in fact, invalidity is interesting!) These structural link types are the most interesting bits of information because they are what we keep in mind when we map from our "mental interface" from one environment to another. [In Topic Maps, the various allowed values for intent would be association types, and in general, you could abuse this column for your own purposes with your own additional association types.] Why such a format? Because it is the simplest format that addresses our problem: we would like to be able to do thoughtful conversion of the thoughts we accumulate from one software environment to another. My goal is that the standard be simple, clear, and elegant enough so that users and assisting programmers understand the relevant issues, and are not confused by irrelevant issues. We are currently designing a converter (in the public domain) between Excel and TheBrain, which means that if you could put your data in this tabular form, then you could see it in TheBrain. There is a Software Development Kit for TheBrain which gives you much greater control. But I am curious if you might see uses for such converters. We need to have a community of users for our standard to be supported with a variety of converters. We are working in the spirit of HTML (rather than SGML), trying to design a framework conceptually clear and simple enough that it could be used by anybody who can manipulate a spreadsheet, download and run macros, or even tweak a bit of code. In other words, so that it would be as easy (or hard) as writing a home page was back in 1995. The end result would be a ThinkerNet - a "slow-motion" kind of connectivity where somebody may go to Africa for three months, come back with a floppy disk full of ideas, or mail it to their friend. I think this vision has a lot in common with TopicMaps, and in particular TopicMaps.Org The purpose of using XML is to popularize TopicMaps. What about using a spreadsheet? Could such a format help popularize TopicMaps? The format I've described can be written up as a subspecification of TopicMaps, a "child-like" version where each topic has only one name and one occurrence. On the other hand, the very same format can, I think, capture the full generality of TopicMaps. This is because we can extend the format in many ways. We can code within the Content many occurrences, and within the Prompt many names, and within the Intent many types. We can use markup languages for each of these fields. We can use duplicate IDs to identify two records as being the same record. We can extend the number of columns. We can use the Content as a pointer to read-only content located elsewhere. The format is useful because it encourages the design of a network of converters that are simple but badly needed (at least I wish I had them so I could make use of many different software tools). I appreciate your thoughts on whether such a format, and such converters, might be useful to you. Andrius Kulikauskas Director Minciu Sodas http://www.ms.lt/importexport.html ms@ms.lt +370 (2) 60-67-38 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Create professional forms and interactive web pages in less time with Mozquito(tm) technology. Form the Web today - visit: http://click.egroups.com/1/6342/4/_/337252/_/963964438/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To Post a message, send it to: xtm-wg@eGroups.com To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: xtm-wg-unsubscribe@eGroups.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Replace complicated scripts using 14 new HTML tags that work in current browsers. 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