At some point in the future, when Noosphere has been worked on sufficiently, we may decide to make AsteroidMeta into a Planet after all – i.e. once Noosphere can be used as a platform for literate programming.
Actually, why wait! I think that Noosphere can be used to simulate a Wiki without much trouble. It might be good for us to have some TeX formatting features for the work that we're doing for the HDM project. If it isn't too hard to add another Noosphere instance, maybe when planetx is up and running we could convert AsteroidMeta to Noosphere? --jcorneli Thu Mar 03 07:42:21 2005 UTC
Maybe a super-wiki would be better, drawing on our earlier discussion. It could be built on an extant, light wiki framework, but also add some structural link types, as well as automatic linking. Or, can joe make the scholium system do this, as a web app…? --akrowne Sat Jul 9 22:44:59 UTC 2005
I've thought some about hooking the "backend" of the scholium system into other frontends. In order to accomplish this, it might be most effective to rewrite the backend in something like Scheme instead of Elisp, at least, I tend to have the sense that Scheme is "more compatible" with other programs, e.g, other "frontends". But I don't know Scheme, nor do I know much about this issue of software compatibility.
Of course, the backend of the system is pretty light weight at present.
Ideally, we'd have one scholium system that could be accessed by any means that we chose (i.e. the same system could be accessed by web or by a standard editing program such as Emacs through CVS). The Emacs implementation itself should be usable as a wiki but without a web interface: instead of loading the recent changes pages, each end user would just synch various CVS repositories so as to have all the scholia stored locally, they would then be browsed from within Emacs.
I'm not at all opposed to getting some web system up and running, but I don't want to get too involved with anything that doesn't offer all of the features outlined in the paper.
If you're interested in working on making the system more interoperable, then I'd be quite happy to work with you on that task. But I want to make sure to complete some system; Emacs interface should be useful in most conditions (even for VI users, with Viper installed), so I think it is worthwhile to focus on that. But if part of the program can be split off into a small, separate, more-compatible backend, I see no problems with that, and I'd be happy to help.
Of course, just about any web interface would be somewhat out of my league, even a very simple one. But I do think that something such as what the "super-wiki" system you described (even one with a very simple interface) should be pretty much interoperable with a live scholium system. If you want to work on something lightweight like this, I don't think it would detract from the scholium system any.
I personally would prefer something with all the free culture (MUDlike) aspects running, and to me that basically means working in LISP. But I also recognize that it may be some time before that's all put together, even if I had extra developer(s) helping me out. So even if it is an "intermediary" measure, a "superwiki" could be a useful thing to have. On the other hand, we'll probably be able to do all the same things a superwiki could do in the scholium system quite soon (but without a web interface for the time being). Does this help answer the question :)?
--jcorneli Sat Jul 09 23:24:05 2005
Yeah. I'm toying with the idea of hacking away at some existing wiki software; perhaps frankensteining it with parts of Noosphere. We can approach this problem from multiple angles =) --akrowne Sat Jul 9 23:53:11 UTC 2005
I'm inclined to think that if we can actually share code, that would be good. But experimenting around could also be fun/useful/instructive. --jcorneli
We (jcorneli and rspuzio) are working on an "Asteroid2" that will appear in the HDM CVS archive for now (potentially taking in other datasources later), and that is based on the scholium system. There is no particular reason not to have a whole "asteroid belt" if that seemed fruitful; indeed, this Asteroid2 will contain discussions mostly relevant to the HDM project, whereas Asteroid1 (i.e. the current one) will continue to be a good place for networking between projects from a more "neutral" point of view (not to be cliched or anything). --jcorneli Jan 11 06
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OK, that seems to be taking a bit longer than expected. We should be looking for another platform for the meantime. (Maybe Asteroid 1A; these things always have funny names!). We need calendars and spam-prevention most seriously, and some kind of semantic-markup would be nice too!
For fun: see Science-Fiction Future of AsteroidMeta.
--jcorneli Jan 4 2007