"Library" (Working Title)

jakintosh · July 18, 2021, 9:40pm

Library (working title)

Video: Screen Capture from 2021-Jul-15

About

Description

“Library” is a 3D semantic knowledge graph browser, intended to make creating and consuming semantically linked data as easy as early browsers made navigating hypertext.

Background

The original shower thought was to rebuild the world wide web in a way that disincentivizes arbitrary reproduction of unhelpful information. For example, when trying to google a muffin recipe, it’s very easy to find dozens of SEO riddled blogs peddling slight variations of the same muffin recipe, but very difficult to find real “knowledge” about how to make a muffin (what are bakers percentages? why is ingredient temperature important? which mixing methods are applicable?). “Library” attempts to solve this problem through the use of semantically linked data combined with intuitive 3D UX patterns.

This app is part of a larger vision to redesign the building blocks of our “decision making infrastructure”. In addition to knowledge management (“Library”), there will also be a goal setting/tracking component (“Initiative”), and a raw data collection/analytic engine (“Dashboard”). All three components will be completely interoperable, and reinforce the utility of the others. My hope is that the combination of these three components will unlock humanity’s potential to cooperate on global issues like climate change, in a decentralized manner. I also hope to enable projects like Open Source Ecology on a much larger scale, and in a more organized way; to enable a world where all intellectual property exists in the open, and every person can contribute to the global good.

Scope

The scope of this project is not yet fully defined. I think the component I can have the largest impact is building the user-facing application that makes it easy and accessible for everyone to learn from and contribute to large linked data graphs. From a schema/protocol perspective, this is obviously something that many people are thinking about and working on, and I’d like to support whatever emerges as the standard protocols. But for the time being, I will also be building a hApp that meets my needs for development. So from a holochain perspective, the bare minimum will be a hApp that supports content objects, versioned and authored content-diff objects, and link objects that have user definable types. The design of the graph that I’ve built is inspired by (but not strictly conforming to) RDF triples.

Project stage

Wrapping up early “research” phase, moving into more focused MVP development. Six months ago I had not heard of holochain, nor the decentralized web space in general. In that time I have been consuming and processing massive amounts of information on the decentralization of technology/economy/collaboration, while experimenting and building toolsets for application development (I had to leave a full suite of custom tools behind the intellectual property wall at my previous job, and start from scratch).

Similar apps, sites, projects, inspirations

Wikipedia + git, if designed by Apple
Project Xanadu
hWiki?
Wikinodes?
_Prtcl?
Please point me to others, there must be more

Resources

None, yet. github soon.

Team

Members

just me (@jakintosh)

Team Skills

Front end — Unity (10)
User Interface Design (8)
Project Management (8)
3D Modeling (7)
Holochain — Theory (5)
Holochain — In Practice (2)

Commitment

Full Time

Needs

Intellectual comrades to bounce and borrow ideas.
((I would also accept patronage; I am currently self-funding this project and will be releasing everything as free and open source, for the good of the planet.))

bierlingm · July 19, 2021, 7:42am

Thanks for the more structured presentation of the project you mentioned elsewhere, very cool!

I don’t have much feedback at the moment. I would like to know whether you looked into some of the writings and work of Ceptr and the MetaCurrency Project, which are Holochain’s mother and grandmother in a way?

Not to say that you need to, just curious. Especially given that you’ve looked deeply into semantic web stuff, this might be another push of inspiration as to how far it can be taken.

The two video deep dives really took it to another level for me when I first watched them.

stephenpurkiss · July 19, 2021, 9:53am

Check out my thread collating IEML (“Information Economy Meta Language”) resources.

The trick / key is indeed to make it not only easy to be able to encode but also for it to integrate into the natural process of encoding information. I believe this is completely context dependent, so for example Internet of Things devices have a limited vocabulary so that should be easy enough “it is raining”, “it is 4 degrees C” etc.

Where I believe Holochain helps is as processes are re-imagined their dictionaries and actions are defined, so for example the recent Holochain ecosystem YouTube session on New York Textile Lab defines a new process where such exercise could be performed. So gradually we build a new, more meaningful web.

jakintosh · July 19, 2021, 4:24pm

Yes! I’ve read through as much as I could possibly find about Holochain and backwards into Ceptr and MetaCurrency, many of Art and Eric’s personal writings as well.

To give more context, a lot of these ideas came out of my experience with seeing tools like Roam Research, then coupled with a lot of reading I did last year about the “early days” of computer science; for example, the books “The Art and Science of Doing Engineering” by Hamming, and “The Dream Machine” by Waldrop about JCR Licklider kind of opened a portal for me to some of the original problems that those minds were trying to solve, as opposed to the commodified “product-oriented” software industry of today. The ideas of Vannevar Bush on the Memex, along with Norbert Weiner’s development of Cybernetics were huge inspirations for me. A few months into my project I also discovered that Ted Nelson’s Xanadu was very similar to what I was working on, which helped me project some of those older ideas forward in time. Then finally, stumbling upon Holochain, I felt like I’d found the spiritual successor to all of these threads of thinking.

The grand visions of Ceptr are extremely exciting to me, and part of my goal with this project is to try to use the human brain to fill in some of the technology gaps that we don’t have yet up and running (like widespread self-describing pluggable protocols) in order to solve the pressing issues of the moment, and give humanity the time to actually get that far. My bet is that we can get really far along the goal of “connecting and organizing the world’s knowledge” by hand (like wikipedia) without relying an AI and big data processing to “reveal” the connections for us. The billions of human brains touching the web on a daily basis are much more efficient/capable of making complex connections than an algorithm in Google’s data centers.

Anyway! Thanks for commenting. I’m excited to start engaging a bit more around this project

jakintosh · July 19, 2021, 10:55pm

I created a discussion about some of the Holochain specific designs for this application here: Versioned and Authored Content Deltas.