My first thought is, of course, Topic Maps -- in idea that, at least in
its original form, sprang directly out of HyTime, both syntactically and
philosophically. But this appears to be a bit different from the Topic
Maps idea of standardizing an SGML/XML rhetoric for interchanging -- and
for collaboratively participating in the further sharing/exploitation --
some shared perspective by means of documents -- Topic Maps -- that
organize information around some finite complex of related subjects of
conversation, while disclosing how the subjects are
identified/distinguished.
It's a little hard to tell from Omnity's Terms and Conditions exactly
what they're up to. At least at first glance, this appears to be more
like a kind of search engine, with the added wrinkles of license fees,
and, I suspect, that the value of the licensee's knowledge-curation
activities will remain exploitable by Omnity. An intellectual Facebook,
perhaps?
