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Which is why Alan Kay says software development is a
pop culture: it recycles songs, ideas, and people
in accordance with bandwidth, processor power, and
depth of understanding (necessarily shallow and not
always historically aware).
But the interesting part is that the Gray clearly articulates
that unstructured and weakly structured data isn't going
away, so we should deal with it. If that means pulling
out ways we understand that are simple, approximate and
reliable even if old, so much the better. I'd rather
deal with prior art frankly. I began looking at quantum
logic (fab if you had the hardware) but found I circled
back to VSMs because a) they work and b) we understand them.
In the Hytime standard, there is a locator type called
fcsloc (finite coordinate system locator) that was applied
to page layout. But at the time, we discussed how the
same kinds of locators could be applied to conceptual
maps such as VSM produces. Things diverged into topic
maps but I suspect that they will converge again shortly
and as typical, in a simpler form. Using a VSM approach
to generate a first cut or tunable topic map isn't that
far-fetched.
len
From: Bob Wyman [mailto:bob@wyman.us]
Claude L Bullard wrote:
>I like this part:
> "One interesting development worth noting, however, has to do
> with the integration of database systems and file systems..."
This is a "development"? Doesn't anyone remember VAX/VMS? It had RMS
(Records Management System) which presented the user with a choice of file
types: sequential, block I/O, record oriented, indexed, etc. All built-in.
Having indexed ISAM files as a core function of the operating system was a
wonderful thing...
I remember meetings in the mid-80s when we were seriously
considering bundling a stripped down version of RDB (our relational
database) as a component of the VMS operating system as well. The thinking
was that since we could see how all of our application products would be
enhanced if they used RDB for data storage, it might make it easier for us
to build and ship products if developers could simply assume that there was
an RDBMS available on every platform.
bob wyman (ex-DEC)
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