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Subject: [xtm-wg] IrDAKiss
Hello,
I had the good fortune to attend the February 27 - March 2 meeting.
I will probably not be able to attend the upcoming meeting in Paris, but
I would very much like to work more closely with the XTM workgroup.
I learned about your work from the discussion forum for TheBrain.
Our laboratory, Minciu Sodas, www.ms.lt, is developing an import/export
standard for tools for organizing thoughts. Information on our work is
at http://www.ms.lt/importexport.html
TheBrain, www.thebrain.com, and MindJET, www.mindmanager.com, are
sponsoring work at our laboratory, and we are looking for more
sponsors. We work as a networking club, designing our investigations so
that we bring together a community as together we develop a conceptual
framework.
I have much more to learn about topic maps, and I am thankful to
Steve Pepper for his very readable papers. I include below a letter
which I wrote for TheBrain discussion forum where I discuss how I think
the standard we are working on might relate to topic maps. I think that
our goals are different, but it would be great if the result was well
integrated. I currently think that our standard should be a modeling
language with implementations in various formats, such as XML, CORBA,
OBEX, XLinks, lists, *.dbf files, Excel spreadsheets, but certainly
TopicMaps.
I see that there is much interest in TheBrain from the Topic Map
community, and vice versa. Also, I have spoken with Nick Duffill of
MindJET, and he is interested in the prospects of working with
publishers to see what kind of information might be published in
MindManager mind maps. Other members of our laboratory include the
free-software http://thoughtstream.org and www.memes.net and also the
proprietary www.multicentric.com
I have focused my efforts on working through the Infrared Data
Association, www.irda.org, which brings together the major companies in
mobile computing. We have a Special Interest Group there, Flow of
Experiences, and our directional proposal, Exploratory IrDAKiss, was
passed by all of the committees, but at the last meeting the IrDA Board
neither approved nor disapproved. My idea is that we need to have an
explanation why our standard would be important on the everyday level,
and that idea is that the IrDA universe (with 150,000,000 tranceivers in
place and growing) is virtually silent because it does not have the
right conceptual format (as HTML appears to have been to make the
Internet meaningful for most people). I am arguing that the Infrared
universe (beaming information between devices) must realize its
advantages over other networks (such as Internet or Blue Tooth) in that
exchanging information by beaming is a deliberate (personal) and
negotiated (social) act. This makes beaming the most personal way of
exchanging electronic information. It also makes beaming a hassle. So
we need a conceptual format where we send aggregated bundles (small
trees, webs, sequences of information) because it will always be tedious
to send across single items. These bundles (think of complex email
attachments) will be nice because people can explore them, reassemble
them, share them, move them about to the relevant output device, at
their leisure. We will be able to construct "experience packages"
("care packages") consisting of clips of text, voice, photos, cash,
etc. The social act is best thought of as a kiss, hence "irdakiss", and
this is what IrDA could mean on the everyday level. We need more
support from fellow IrDA members to make progress, but our ideas have
been acknowledged as relevant and valuable, and I myself guess, a bit
uncomfortable.
Ours will be a conceptual standard, meant first of all for the
high-end user and the developer of converters. So there must be
conceptual clarity, and to achieve this it helps to have more than one
implementation, so we do not confuse the concept with the
implementation. Having said that it would be great to have an
implementation in TopicMaps, and I would be happy to work with you
closely - as a group or with individuals - on that. This would be a
great concrete example for us to develop.
I also invite you - individuals, companies, and even perhaps the
entire group as a whole - to join our laboratory as members. You can
become members by paying our membership fee ($300 for twelve months) but
more common is becoming a member for free by contributing work to our
projects in the public domain. These are archives on which we build our
research. For example, we have a survey, "Do you organize your
thoughts?", http://www.ms.lt/ms/projects/tooluses/990608surveyen.html
and you can view (and copy and distribute) answers we have collected at
http://www.ms.lt/ms/projects/structureuses/index.html
A greater help for us now would be answering our survey "What is
your favorite standard?",
http://www.ms.lt/ms/projects/formatkinds/000310survey.html Our member
Saulius Maskeliunas has already answered these questions about TopicMaps
(I welcome your critique of his answers, which I think he has shared
with you). So perhaps we need to rename our survey "What is your second
favorite standard?" The survey is a lot of work, so even completing
half of a survey would suffice for membership, I decide after I review
your answers. (Please let me know if you will work on the survey, so we
can coordinate). We are searching for people who agree that having such
information in a single place would be helpful for you and others as
well as us.
You may have other work that you can contribute or have contributed
to the public domain, that we might use, so please let me know at
ms@ms.lt
I am able to offer, to all of our members, a free license to
TheBrain.
Hello!
Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas
Director
ms@ms.lt
http://www.ms.lt
P.S. Hi to Eric Freese and Jack Park!
*****************************************
Dan Fleming: "The relationship (if there is one?) between the 'Hugh'
interface, Topic Maps and XML is going to be crucial, especially for
people like myself who are interested in using plex-style 'builder'
interfaces in educational client/server systems (e.g. for educators to
build and publish their own 'webs' of learning materials)."
Dan, I'm very interested to learn more about your needs. I found out
about Topic Maps through this discussion forum and was able to
participate at their second meeting in San Jose, California, in
conjunction with the XTech conference, February 27 - March 2.
Sponsorship of our laboratory's work by TheBrain made my trip possible.
With our results at IrDA (see newsletter above) we are very interested
in having alternatives. So I am considering attending or sending a
member of our laboratory to the next topicmaps.org meeting in Paris,
France in June, in conjunction with XML Europe 2000, June 12-16, see
www.gca.org
TheBrain community, and TheBrain technology, will experience a creative
tension between editing and visualizing. You yourself write about
"building and publishing".
There is a lot of short term advantage in visualizing. Many people are
coming to TheBrain seeing at as a great solution for nativigating and
visualizing the information they have.
However, I think the most ambitious vision of TheBrain, is as an editing
tool, a tool for working creatively with our own thoughts. This is what
can lead to the user interface of the future, replacing Windows. Our
major challenge is to figure out what an "author-driven" world might be
like. I think it is a streamlined environment, where we want minimal
clutter, where we want to leverage the knowledge already in our mind as
much as possible.
Import/export works very differently in the two situations. When we
have published information, then we are talking about data, and we might
use TopicMaps - designed for navigation through data - and map the data
without worrying about it. This is the "reader-driven" world that we
are used to.
However, when we are talking about TheBrain as a tool for thinking, then
we have an author who writes down more ideas than they can get back to,
reorganizes fewer than that, edits and polishes fewer than that. An
author uses their brain (and TheBrain) to "mulch" their ideas. An
author's notes are robust, giving birth to new notes, and can be thought
of as a living organism.
TheBrain can lead a paradigm shift where knowledge management can be
based on the individual, the independent thinker first working away,
through "thinking management" of themselves by that individual, and only
then sharing their full blown Brain, without being bothered. Or it can
serve the traditional point of view that knowledge comes from
collaboration, bringing "the right people" together, which favors
navigating over editing, and in my mind, doesn't explain how we become
"the right people". There is a creative tension between the two, but I
think we will need to always make an extra effort on behalf of editing.
If an individual is working away at their notes in TheBrain, for say,
one hundred hours, so that it shapes their thinking, and then would like
to switch over to mind mapping software for a while, (or vice versa), to
shape their thinking, then we are not concerned about data, about the
individual thoughts. We are concerned about the system of thoughts as a
whole. It is like mapping one user interface into another, and the goal
is to do justice to the system over all. There is a risk of
"hyperfaithfulnes", if we preserve more information than was originally
there. For example, children in TheBrain may be unordered - I think
they are ordered alphabetically - now conceptually it makes a big
difference whether we think of them as ordered or unordered, and
certainly in HTML there is a clear distinction between ordered and
unordered lists. It is a rude shock to have these confused, and these
are the kinds of distortions that make an author walk away from all of
their thoughts (whereas losing some thoughts - say having the long ones
cut off - isn't necessarily going to have you walk away from the short
ones). If you don't have the authority of the author, then you'll
probably end up preserving too much information, which was really just
part of the tool, and therefore makes it impossible to work with the new
tool. So for this kind of import/export what we need is a Modeling
Language, something like the Unified Modeling Language, which is used by
consultants so that when they explain object technology ideas to
managers their diagrams fall into more or less consistent kinds. Our
laboratory is developing such a Thinking Modeling Language.
One of the results of our laboratory is that every visualization is
off-balanced, favoring one of the basic structures - sequences,
hierarchies, networks - for organizing thoughts. TheBrain can be used -
if we have the self-discipline of an author - for all of these
structures, it is close to being structurally neutral. In a certain
sense, it is not a visualization, at all, just as working with DOS is
not a visualization, it is a way of "working blind", which for authors
manipulating the relationships between thoughts is actually a great
advantage because it is conceptually more streamlined. The pressure to
develop TheBrain as a tool purely for visualization would take it in the
direction of a hyperbolic browser.
XML is not structurally neutral. First, everything is in a sequential
order, for parsing purposes. Next, it is organized in a hierarchy.
Finally, network links are allowed on top of that. This forces us to
think the way the XML community thinks, which is just one of many ways.
I think that the Modeling Language that we develop will need to have
several different implementations so that users and developers do not
get confused by the trappings of any particular implementation. There
will undoubtedly be one in XML, but also possibly in CORBA. There will
be probably be one for Topic Maps, so it would be good to learn more
about your work. There will be a set of basic implementations, and then
recommendations on how to map with them.
At the XML and Topic Maps meeting that I attended I spoke of a continuum
between the independent author-thinker (who we strive to serve) and the
global encyclopedia of knowledge (which they strive to serve).
Knowledge percolates, starts with the authors and ends up in the
encyclopedia. There are many steps in between. My desire is that we
have separate standards, but that they be well integrated, perhaps by
having an implementation of our standard in terms of Topic Maps.
Also, I helped point out that for all of us XML is simply a tactical
choice to help popularize and implement standards. The ensuing
discussion lead to a name change from XTM (XML and Topic Maps) to
topicmaps.org Also, I asked for use cases, and said we find it
important to collect them. They don't have any collected, as I
understood. So a handful of strong ideas and a handful of compelling
use cases and a handful of advocates is what it takes for us to get big
things done.
Nick Duffill of MindJET, www.mindmanager.com, a member of our
laboratory, says that he is interested in mindmaps as a vehicle for
publishing. The TopicMaps community is a great place to schmooze with
publishers and so I may approach MindJET with the idea that they sponsor
our particpation at the next meeting. For our standard to be valuable
we need a community that supports it and so it is great to always bring
in more supporters.
Write me, if you are interested in these topics, because your ideas and
use cases and advocacy shape our approach. We are very happy to help
you become members of our laboratory and even represent our laboratory
at the standards meetings.
Also - most of my proposal to IrDA is at:
http://www.ms.lt/ms/projects/formatkinds/000315directional.html
Yours,
Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas laboratory
http://www.ms.lt/importexport.html
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