On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 02:54:38AM +0000, Albert Selvin wrote: (01)
> But, to me, what's really interesting about Compendium is not any of these
> individually. It's the ability to interweave them, to create deep
> hypertexts, and to manipulate them in real time (as in live group sessions)
> without programming, as well as to be able to interchange the data and
> metadata created with other sorts of tools and approaches. (02)
I agree with this. The dirty little secret behind Compendium is that
it embodies a lot of the principles behind the Open Hyperdocument
System. Perhaps this isn't so surprising if you consider that Jeff
Conklin, the intellectual father of Dialog Mapping and graphical IBIS,
considers Doug Engelbart one of his two intellectual grandfathers (the
other being Horst Rittel, the inventor of IBIS). (03)
Compendium makes heavy use of transclusions and multiple views.
Additionally, when you use some of the importing tools people have
written, you can essentially import textual documents into a
Compendium graph. Once you have that document in graph form, you can
do all the things we've talked about -- transclusions, granular
addressability, laying new structure on top of existing structure,
etc. (04)
There's really some deep stuff in Compendium. It's not just a great
facilitation or information tool. I'm not sure if you can capture the
depth in an elevator speech. (05)
There's one other tool in the market today that I think really
embodies the principles of the Open Hyperdocument System. It's the
spreadsheet. Instead of a graph structure, you have a table structure
(although you can express a table as a graph). You have granular
addressability at the cell level. You have transclusions by plugging
in the cell address into another cell. You have multiple views. (06)
If you take Microsoft Excel and plug an OLAP server on the backend,
you really have a very powerful system -- things like granular access
control, versioning etc. (07)
-Eugene (08)
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Was I helpful? Let others know. (09)
http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=eekim&p=EnablingOnlineCommunities (010)
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