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Interesting. You need to be careful with the UI, though. It might be easy to express one's thoughts as a knowledge-graph, because you're familiar with each node individually. But for others to traverse that graph the structure needs to be much more organized. You can easily get "lost" in cliques that hide content not very well connected. It's much easier for a newcomer to traverse a tree, and there is the ages-old HMI rule of "no more than 3 levels and 7 items per level".

About computation, you might find this interesting: http://askemos.org/
I haven't used it, but I read about it sometime ago... perhaps it intersects some things you have in mind.

Dunno how private theirs will be.

But if they would actually replicate the server locally like this http://askemos.org/index.html/Non-Repudiation ? ...then BALL would beat them being the first.

Probably they should. We've been working for years on a cloud-alike, open source system (ball) where mutual distrust is the founding principle. Too few people who care about priciples. All they ask for is maximum convinience today.

I actually wrote such a thing, which lets you go from parsed trees back (and forth) to text.

Better an example than prog langs are wiki edits. I *store* html. To edit I present normally markdown. If this doesn't fit, there's an option to use another encoding - up to ugly xml.

More here.

Let me second that!

And start simple and recursive like this!

Is Askemos for you?

Yes. askemos.
Not yet a clone. But a p2p replacement for webservers with scriptable application on the caches/peers.

There is software at here which does that for you: run several copies of you data under supervision of different admins in byzantine agreement. 30% rough admins pose no problem.

I dunno what Translattice does - no source available.

The infrastucture description on its website looks kind of simillar to Askemos.org
(which is GPLed).

Recently I wrote this note, which shall become kind of a tutorial.
I hope it will give you an idea, whether ot not this could be for you:
using SQL

(So far I'm working in two environments with it: a) public (cutomer+ours) websites run from a mixture of Linux and FreeBSD on mixture of 32bit, 64bit Intel and ARM; and b) a node 5 Segate Docstar network in a suitcase. And without breaking CAP: 3/2n+1 nodes required.)

I dunno what Translattice does - no source available.

The infrastucture description on its website looks kind of simillar to Askemos.org
(which is GPLed).

Recently I wrote this note, which shall become kind of a tutorial.
I hope it will give you an idea, whether ot not this could be for you:
using SQL

(So far I'm working in two environments with it: a) public (cutomer+ours) websites run from a mixture of Linux and FreeBSD on mixture of 32bit, 64bit Intel and ARM; and b) a node 5 Segate Docstar network in a suitcase. And without breaking CAP: 3/2n+1 nodes required.)

... or you can program in CSP (communicating sequential processes) multiprogramming style which is an old technique even by UNIX epoch standards.

There are plenty of CSP-style large scale projects that really are assembled from discrete single-threaded programs; this works well for distribution across loosely-coupled clusters (and even topologically distant sets of those) whereas most multi-threaded programming paradigms make strong assumptions on things like expected delays and bandwidths and their derivatives (like uniformity). CSP is amenable to composition of single processes, much like discrete UNIX programs can be assembled into pipelines. (The QNX shell syntax for distributed computation and i/o is even more instructive as an analogy, or see the on(1) manpage and consider that "on" can form part of a pipeline.)

A very large example of CSP is Askemos which is a German Scheme-based multiprocessing/multiprogramming/concurrency system. Unfortunately for the wider world, finer-grained elucidations of Askemos's design in English are rare, in part because it's already in real, productive, profitable use in German-speaking agencies and organizations.

On smaller scales, many Mac OS X applications have separate processes (often written in different languages!) for the front-end user interface and back-end computation and persistence activities. Some of the most compute intensive software packages organize the back-ends into pipeline-like networks, which is classic CSP style.

The most significant drawback to CSP is that the inter-SP communication protocol must be appropriate to the job, and the risk is that it's too heavyweight compared to techniques like STM or lock-full shared memory. However, by analogy to transport layer techolonogy, TCP was considered far too heavyweight for LAN-based communications for many years, and nobody seriously considered using TCP for IPC on the same system -- nowadays, TCP is pervasive and cheap and is assisted by the low cost of compression and decompression (and even encryption) of the higher-layer data it carries.

In short, time-space tradeoffs probably will favour spending time to reduce the amount of inter-SP data exchange even given fairly tightly coupled multi-processor systems.

Have you read about http://www.askemos.org/ ? It seems to do what you are looking for.

Great news for those who want to follow: We run such a service for our customers. Using Askemos for tamper proofed process replication we run a network of nodes owned by several companies.

We have a peering agreement, no matter what dies, be it a host or even a hosting company, our customers websites continue to run - undisturbed.

1. make a virtual computer, which processes code just good enough to trust it with law and order
2. write some code to the processor, which resembles legal acts (like contracting, legal logic...)
3. patent number 2
4. have some cofee and watch the legal system beeing locked up

It's an intrusion resistant, non-repudiable and incorruptible system.

WebDAV to be released the other day.

I spent the better part of three year implementing a fault tollerant programming environment and released it under GPL. Please visit Askemos [askemos.org] to find it. br

Well, we leave the data where it belongs: in the proxy network where the processes live too. Still a bit incomplete, but maturing WebDAV and mountable slices forthcoming...

I spent the better part of three year implementing a fault tollerant programming environment and released it under GPL. Please visit Askemos to find it.

I spent the better part of three year implementing a fault tollerant programming environment and released it under GPL. Please visit Askemos to find it.

I spent the better part of three year implementing a fault tollerant programming environment and released it under GPL. Please visit Askemos to find it.

There is no chance that this patent can stand. I make my tax euros exactly that way. I published first implementations of that mechanism around '93 (using SGML of course, there was no XML; LaTeX, Lout, roff and other scripts where mixed). I'm even doing this to implement distributed operating system. I'm using that to proof intrusion resistance, incorruptibility and non-deniability.

Some looser has wasted some $ for patent fees.

That's yet another case, where I feel compelled to leave a shameless plug: We develop the solution over there!

It works, it's fun to work with and it's free. Come and find out!

if someone created a Knoppix-like bootable "secure" distro

That's exactly what we are doing here! Askemos is a (gpl'ed) P2P layer, distributed on Knoppix-booted CD. It has a permission system as widely applicable as set theory can get you. And set theory is the means we use to proof that you can't abuse the administrative account.

Operating systems should not have any super user (root) account at all.

Why?
Those super priviledges are an anachronism which doesn't fit the world. Most of us live in a democratic society. Democracy has historical won over the hierarchical societies - for a reason. Now if we want to model the real world, we are orced to map it to a kingdom like world. If there was no super user to hack a lot of vulnerabilities where gone.

But we need administration! Yes, we need even more fine grained access control, but no entral authority. We need to grant and revoke rights and subrights among each other.

How? The Paper Askemos - a virtual settlement describes (among other aspects of Askemos) a set theory based priviledge system which handles that. (You might also look at the slides from the most recent talk at the netobjectdays.org conference here
(there only temporary).

Operating systems should not have any super user (root) account at all.

Why?
Those super priviledges are an anachronism which doesn't fit the world. Most of us live in a democratic society. Democracy has historical won over the hierarchical societies - for a reason. Now if we want to model the real world, we are orced to map it to a kingdom like world. If there was no super user to hack a lot of vulnerabilities where gone.

But we need administration! Yes, we need even more fine grained access control, but no entral authority. We need to grant and revoke rights and subrights among each other.

How? The Paper Askemos - a virtual settlement describes (among other aspects of Askemos) a set theory based priviledge system which handles that. (You might also look at the slides from the most recent talk at the netobjectdays.org conference here
(there only temporary).

We've forseen another dark age. Even worse that media failure are proprietary data formarts! (Did anybody ever stored important text in M$ Word?)

But don't worry the solution is already in the works.

233 MHz Pentium II + XSLT + mandatory access control == apache performance

You see, some things work

It's a pity that there's no email address...

Poor man's free alternative to Tamino (Askemos) could have been mentioned.

This ruling does make a difference! You know why: for copyright law.

If this holds up, than ESR was right in Homesteading the Noosphere, where he describes our world as an virtual information space independant of the physical space.

Following that idea consequently, I coded the Askemos system and had to conclude that it is impossible to copy information in that space.

Could someone find out the reference please!

This ruling does make a difference! You know why: for copyright law.

If this holds up, than ESR was right in Homesteading the Noosphere, where he describes our world as an virtual information space independant of the physical space.

Following that idea consequently, I coded the Askemos system and had to conclude that it is impossible to copy information in that space.

Could someone find out the reference please!

The funny thing is: jails already exists somehow:

When I wrote the Askemos system, which works from exactly the same assumption (namely an information space being independant of the physical space as already lined out by ESR over the past year in Homesteading the Noosphere) I had to model a democratic rights system. Suddenly I found myself coding a virtual jail!

The realy interesting consequence is something else: you can't copy information is such a space.

Maybe there are some people who don't like that judge anymore, but don't know that yet;-)

The funny thing is: jails already exists somehow:

When I wrote the Askemos system, which works from exactly the same assumption (namely an information space being independant of the physical space as already lined out by ESR over the past year in Homesteading the Noosphere) I had to model a democratic rights system. Suddenly I found myself coding a virtual jail!

The realy interesting consequence is something else: you can't copy information is such a space.

Maybe there are some people who don't like that judge anymore, but don't know that yet;-)

The funny thing is: jails already exists somehow:

When I wrote the Askemos system, which works from exactly the same assumption (namely an information space being independant of the physical space as already lined out by ESR over the past year in Homesteading the Noosphere) I had to model a democratic rights system. Suddenly I found myself coding a virtual jail!

The realy interesting consequence is something else: you can't copy information is such a space.

Maybe there are some people who don't like that judge anymore, but don't know that yet;-)

Why not build a trusted network on a free platform (Askemos). There should always be a choice.

Does lisp have application servers? Does lisp has db connectivity? ... Does lisp have web page templating functionality?

Yes. See Askemos

Askemos is a distributed operating system without a central authority...

fun already

For a virtual world we ought to separate the infos from the media. We could store data and execute programs some computers and use the majority result. See Askemos how this will work.

Once we are at it, we might find that files are worse than paper for another reason. We better had "write once" files. - If reusable paper were better that nomal paper, we would have it in the stores. Enough cycles of invention went over it already.

My favorite quote from the evolution site:

This is especially true in open-source software, where the only real barrier to use is complexity.

I'd like to add a second barrier: how to find it.

Even though Askemos is in it's infancy, it's simple at least, standards based and promises P2P distribution.