Designing a global knowledge base (by alaric)

Continuing from my previous posts on HYDROGEN and IRON, I suppose the next thing I can talk about is CARBON.

One thing that users expect out of a system is some form of navigational structure. All but the simplest embedded computer systems have some kind of menu structure; while workstations often have several somewhat confusingly overlaid structures (menus in applications, a "My Documents" hierarchy full of personal stuff, a "Start Menu" or "Applications Folder" full of system-wide resources, and a "My Computer" hierarchy with things like removable drives and their contents, printers, access to the internals of the system, mounted network drives, and the like; then, via a Web browser, a hierarchy of bookmarks and then whatever navigational structures different Web sites out in the world present to you.

So, I clearly needed some concept of "large-scale organisation of resources" in ARGON. After much deliberation, I came up with CARBON. But, as usual, I like to kill several birds with one stone.

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Generic Functions (by alaric)

When most people think of object-oriented programming, they think of the interpretation of it that originated in Simula, that has since bubbled into Java, C++, and so on. Or maybe the prototype-based variant found in Self or JavaScript.

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Photo Booth and the inbuilt iSight make a fairly good shaving mirror (by alaric)

Designing a general data model (by alaric)

All that talking about HYDROGEN was such fun, I was sad it was over.

So what could I explain about ARGON next? My design for CHROME is currently just a list of features and a plan for how to put them together, with no details whatsoever; TUNGSTEN is still in flux because I have research to do in the field of replicated storage, LITHIUM depends on TUNGSTEN, MERCURY depends on CARBON and LITHIUM, and so on.

So, I guess I'll have to talk about IRON, which is a data model.

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HYDROGEN: Conclusion (by alaric)

As promised, here is the sixth and final part of my series on HYDROGEN, where I draw some conclusions and discuss the road ahead.

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