Shawn Rutledge (ecloud at bigfoot.com)

Interested in building a knowledge-base implementation on top of Xanadu.

For many years I've wanted to build a general-purpose knowledge base, but can't decide on how best to store object structures on disk. After much thought, and having encountered the Xanadu concepts, decided that maybe plain text with all the cool versioning features should be the fundamental datatype; and objects which structure this text, and relationships between such objects, are higher-level things which should only reference the text, not store it directly.

Maybe someday computers can have a true cognitive model of information, storing facts in the same way our brains do, and using text only as a means of expressing knowledge, rather than for storage. But for now we don't know how to do that, and we do have great need to store and organize literature, and a lot of minutiae of daily life (names, phone numbers, appointments, relationships, dates, etc).

So the first order of business is to replace the filesystem and the relational database with something more flexible, something which acknowledges the existence of time and the need to record history, rather than just a snapshot of the present; and then to build ever more-complex referential structures on top of enduring textual substrate. If the Xanadu concept of "links" could be the basis of these higher-level structures too, so much the better.