(2002-03-26) b

Eugene Kim (of the Open Hyperdocument System project) on Interoperability Between Collaborative Knowledge Applications: Towards a Standard Graph-Based Data Model for the Open Hyperdocument System . RDF, IBIS-based systems, Group Discussion, etc. But no mention of Blog Thread, which isn't surprising, since blogs aren't used this way much yet.

This paper was triggered by a thread about inserting Purple Numbers into EMail messages to make them Paragraph Addressable. I don't see a way to make real progress at collaboration until we can manage some sort of addressable content in email, which is our primary means of transferring collaborative materials. I'm not sure this is necessary, since most emails are short enough that more granular addressing for discussion isn't really that necessary. Tracing a discussion at a conceptual level across a long thread would be much more interesting (like IBIS), but would probably require a level of user formalism that's not realistic. I think it might make more sense just to have any email archive so that there's message-level addressability in the future (e.g. referring back to an old thread). But I'm not even sure that's necessary, since in my experience everyone keeps very old email archives of their own (and with cheap disk space it's hard to argue about).

Then Eugene made the case that The final conclusion is that a Wiki is a perfect candidate OHS application. It has collaborative editing (Collaborative Writing) and back-links. But this same message made the point about graphs, and people jumped on that bandwagon instead.