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Better yet, don't ask just rewrite it. I disclose my current project by generic type ie.
rocket & rocket engine designs, advanced hypertext systems &algorithms including novel interfaces, robotics, etc. Any to these that may be conflicting, I can specify in more detail.
I've never had a problem with this, although once my employer did. They were being acquired and need me to specify that none of mine confilcted with any of theirs. At that point arguing about specifics and not potentials, there was no problem. This is usually the case, if you have them, they are quite reasonable, and don't try to steal anything.

http://udanax.com/
http://halfwaytoanywhere.com/

You might have claimed that both web servers and browsers were inspired by Ted Nelson's Xanadu. But thats vaporware, so it can't really be considered open or closed source.

Actually on further reseach I see Ted Nelson has released two versions of Xanadu. And I am glad to see he released them as explicitly open source. He chose the X11 licence.

http://www.udanax.com/

So I want to apologize for calling it vaporware when its been out for more tha 5 years

Roger Gregory, for those who don't know, was a large part of the Xanadu project. I found the Armadillo project interesting, but the engine design described in the url below, blew my mind.
Rotary Rocket Engine

You mean like here: http://www.udanax.com/?

Also google for Udanax - there are projects blossoming!

Adam Moore, Post-Doc Researcher, ZigZag for Bioinformatics

That server is also dead.

The last time I checked the source there, there was no evidence of code maintenance, so I don't know if anyone is working on it. There's no Freshmeat record for either Xanadu or Udanax, suggesting that nobody has forked the code.

Freshmeat does refer to a data organization package by Nielson, called ZigZag, which allowed multi-dimensional data organization, but I don't know enough about it to say if it'll do anything that other data schemes (HDF5, netCDF, XML, ....) don't.

No, nothing from Xanadu will be added to the web. Nothing but ActiveX extensions will be added to the web.

First of all, the Xanadu project, despite being a "failure", has been enormously influential. You may not know much about it, but just about every single person who's messed around with creating a hypertext system does, certainly Tim-Berners Lee did (and not incidentally, the original Netscape programming team certainly did also).

Try doing some google searches, try understanding what Xanadu was about, then pick a feature from it and see if you can figure out a way to kludge it into the web. If you pull it off, you'll have achieved something worthwhile. Off the top of my head: transclusion, back-links, micropayments, versioning, fine-grained linking...

By the way, the Xanadu code was open-sourced some years ago: xanadu source code

It's not exactly vaporware, though, since Xanadu has always been a concept, not a product; there have been numerous implementations, some of which did reach running code (the ALGOL implementation of the 1970s!) and some of which have been released (the open-source release of the code for the 1980s and 1990s versions, now called Udanax).

For working code, including a working front-end, see: www.udanax.com and www.sunless-sea.net

Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***

Greets!

The reason that 3D isn't popular or practical - paper. Our current metaphor for information derives from Xerox Parc, a PAPER company. A faithful emulation of an office desk is NOT the best way to represent the complex infoverse we live in.

And the current web is not the best way to represent it either. Go back to hypertextual research before the web - look at Guide, look at Microcosm, before the brain damage of HTML and Mosaic set in.

Even better, go and look at Xanadu and ZigZag - representing information and the relationships between individual pieces of it is a complex task, perhaps made harder by our current metaphors. See ANYTHING by Ted Nelson, such as his technical briefing at the latest Hypertext conference.Read Vannevar Bush's "As we may think"

I would argue that we don't need 3D browsers, but MULTIDIMENSIONAL infoviewers, that can let us define the relationships and properties that we are interested at any moment, AND LET US CHANGE THEM easily and intuitively - I still remember the only good part of Johnny Mnemonic - zooming around cyberspace - also, to a lesser degree Lawnmower Man.

This is the way forward, and we need to learn from the games industry - Look at Homeworld, Q3D, even Elite - these are the kind of intuitive navigational and representational metaphors we ned to adopt to allow people to create, browse, populate and interact with their information.

Let us be imaginative, and move forwards to a representation of information as something we can use, rather than something we write down.

Links:
Microcosm:(Home) http://www.iam.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
(Review)http://www.man.ac.uk/MVC/SIMA/mcosm/toc.ht ml
Guide: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0142.html
HyperText Conference: http://www.ht01.org/
GZigZag - http://gzigzag.sf.net
Xanadu: http://www.udanax.com
http://www.xanadu.com
As We May Think: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/comput er/bushf.htm
The electronic labyrinth - a good intro to hypertext, slanted toward literature http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/elab.html

The ultimate vaporware story was and is, in fact, Xanadu (see Udanax). Ten brownie points to anyone who can measure the difference of success between them and CYCorp!

Also Ted Nelson's book Dream Machines/Computer Lib and hyperlinks to xanadu & udanax might be appropriate.

Prof. Ted Nelson is the guy who invented the modern concept of hyperlinks. He devoted his life and work to the idea of a pefectly designed global repository of hyperlinked objects. Unfortunately, the designed turned out to be a white elephant; OTOH, when the WWW was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, it was just poor and broken enough that the worse-is-better gang who runs things would adopt it as a suitable lowest common denominator. Nelson never got the recognition he deserved, and lost his funding. Finally, in 1998 (IIRC) he resorted to opening the existing sources of Xanadu software; it's now available as Udanax (here. Sadly, that seems to have gone nowhere either.

The third session will describe ways in which collective intelligence can be improved with appropriate methodologies and information technology-based tools. The primary focus of the session will be on processes for concurrent development, integration, and application of knowledge (CoDIAK), and their relationship to a dynamic knowledge repository [...]

[...] an Open Hyper-document System will be described [...]

Take slashdot as an example. Somone submits a story about software licenses. A bunch of us beat our heads together in public about the merits of the GPL, the BSD, and so on. Moderators work it over and make it easy to find the better written arguments. And then a day later, the information is effectively all dead, and we all get to go through the same scramble the next time software licenses come up.

Wouldn't it be better if we were working *toward* something here? Say if we were all trying to develop a document that summarizes the basic arguments, so we don't have to go through the same old stuff every time?

The trouble is that whenever anyone tries to perfect something like this, they run into some kind of difficulties. I tend to think of this as "The Curse of Xanadu" (now open sourced, but still apparently dead: www.udanax.com).

(And it doesn't bode well that he's using terms like "CoDIAK". Screwed up capitialization is is one of the marks of a doomed project.)

Anyway, I second the recommendation to check out The Bootstrap Alliance. It looks like they're going for it: http://www.bootstrap.org/alliance/dkr/.

Wow, thanks. I think that's one of the nicest technical things i've heard someone say about me.

I wrote Pyxi. And it really isn't very well documented at all -- it was quite rushed, done in a couple of weeks or so (most of it in the last weekend before the demo).

An important point i want to make is that i do not understand the back-end code at all, and i didn't have to understand how it worked in order to write the front-end. I wrote Pyxi entirely based on a paper protocol specification which is now published at the website.

This means other people can develop on top of the back-end too. I only joined the project recently to write the front-end, and i agree the back-end code is pretty hard to read!

Watch for another release with more documentation and stuff.

-- ?!ng