AsynchronousBlog

Havoc Pennington on Filesystems

+1 on the idea of a personal WebDAV server as being the center of a new manner of data interaction in a desktop environment. But I think it’s important that it’s not simply a “document” storage system. While important, people get funny ideas about what a “document” is vs. what data people are more apt to create in the course of an interaction session with a computer … there is a unseen but real call for a Personal Data Server, which allows for the structured creation of interelated micro-content.

I’m speaking here about things like “phone book records”, “recipes”, “movie reviews”, “to do lists”, “wish lists” … they’re not sexy, nor grand, and therein lies the strength of the system. I assert that they can all be represented, and the system can be built, in a purely declarative manner.

More specifically the combination of: * personal HTTP+WebDAV server * RDFS and OWL for schematic description * a presently-undefined high-level user-interface ontology * infrastructure around efficient storage, indexing, searching and data-inspection GnomeStorage

The following is a response mailed to a friend of mine about Jim Webber’s post.

I generally agree with the graph, but… imagine that that graph doesn’t have time as it’s x-axis, but instead has “inverse [user] expressibility” as it’s x-axis. The y-axis then needs to become…”constraint”.

I think there’s a negative-slope graph of some other quantity — maybe “understandability” or “optimizability” or “infrastructure utility” or something that crosses the above one just /at/ REST … and maybe even just to the left of it.

The line itself is … something … maybe … “goodness” or “Quality”, and it is actually the lower bound of the two lines posited above. Thus, it peaks [just to the left of] REST…

WebDAV is just to the left of REST.

And there’s something else, with a very small number of additional verbs, just to the left of that.

But, I believe, that’s where it peaks.

To the right is the semantic fog of “do” [or "processMessage" or whatever...].

To the left is a whole layer devoted to the transfer of arbritrary verbs, which is, effectively, also a semantic fog of “do”.

Right at the peak is an area where the infrastructure is actually something the application can leverage, since the operational semantics are well defined. I think. I’m not quite sure, how, yet, but I’m trying to figure that out… :) At least, developers/intermediaries/&c. benefit from the consistency and clarity.But I do think there are definitely things that a real container can provide, there.

[For instance, one desire would be to have a first-order b[atch]GET operation, allowing the server to optimize the multiple safe/idempotent read operation.]

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In the mean time, Mark Baker has posted his take , which — as usual — better expresses what I was trying to get across.

This is less of a test. On second review, my stylesheet is coming togehter quite nicely, and I think I’m ready for jsled.digital.presence 2.0 to be launched…

Specifically, I’ve got ~50% more FOAF than before, and a new personal page, which I haven’t really had for a while. The twiki will be relegated to it’s rightful role, and obvousily I’ve got some MT lurvin’ in effect.

So … I’m at the point other people were at ~3 years ago; go me.

Testing.

This is primarily a test in order to get some content, such that I can…

1. rebuild site
2. fetch page
3. hack CSS
4. create stylesheet for basic site.

It just needs to NOT be fugly.