We should think more about creating "nested Noosphere instances" or something like that. This would allow us to do all of the Noosphere projects on one server - and it would presumably let people create a new instance very easily, like you can now do with wikis on Oddwiki @ Taoriver.
Exploring this idea of nested instances could be useful for future work with books, papers, expositions, etc.
See also noosphere literate programming.
That is a neat idea. I hadn't realized the power of what Taoriver does until now. It really lets you get started easily.
In terms of multiple Noospheres on one server, we are actually planning on running PlanetMath and PlanetPhysics on one machine, planetx.cc.vt.edu. This would be done with my vinstall system for virtual servers. However it is worth thinking about how to design Noosphere itself so it could manage multiple instances. I doubt we could expect to see this until the rewrite, though. --akrowne Sat Apr 9 14:37:28 UTC 2005
I wouldn't expect the idea to be implemented immediately, but I do think it should be considered for the rewrite.
If you look at the latest draft of the scholium system paper, you'll see that I talk there (in a footnote) about eventually supporting entire digital libraries as "documents" within a given library. This seems to relate to things you study professionally. I note that access mechanisms for a system of this sort might be more complicated. Instead of just having ABOUT, BEG and END – assuming the sub-library was also a scholium system – you would want to have ABOUT be a list that would tell you "first go to the sublibrary, then go to the sub-document, and then look for BEG and END". Or you could just fill in ABOUT, not as a list, and make a comment on the sub-library as a whole.
The point I wanted to make (before I got distracted talking about the scholium system) is that one nice feature of nested instances would be that we could recategorize things easily. For example, the recent interesting Discussion about Bibliographies and Amazon referrals could perhaps be recategorized as a PlanetMath feature request, rather than a project-nonspecific discussion. (Though it is no problem to leave it where it is, either, because the principles are actually quite general – so I don't think I would want to recategorize it.) It would be very convenient for such recategorizations to be semi-automatic.
On the topic of the Noosphere rewrite generally… well, maybe we should create a page for it? --jcorneli Sat Apr 09 15:49:16 2005 UTC