Re: Arcadia Announcement: Chimera v1.0 release

[Andrew Pam <avatar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Here's an announcement of a hypermedia system that I got from another
> mailing list; it raised some Xanadu-related questions in my mind:

Thanks for forwarding the announcement.  It's amazing how much research is
happening in these fields nowadays; and to think that twenty years ago nobody
could understand what Ted was talking about or why anybody would want these
facilities!

> - Where Chimera and Xanadu have similar functionality, how do they differ in
> architecture?

I don't think I have the time or the in-depth knowledge of the existing Xanadu
servers to answer that question fully, so I've punted your question to Roger
Gregory and Keith Henson of Filoli (formerly Memex) who are working on the
original Xanadu server.  However, existing Xanadu work has focussed on logging
file systems and ents (now also known as K-trees) which should prove to be more
scalable and more reliable than many existing file system approaches.

> - What, if any, is the intended relation between Xanadu and other related
> systems and projects such as this one and the WWW?

(a) Most of these systems and projects are either directly or indirectly
derived from the Xanadu ideas, usually as expressed in "Literary Machines".

(b) The Xanadu ideals are well served by any software which meets its goals,
so we plan to integrate as far as possible with other software which is either
very popular (eg WWW) or provides much of the desired functionality.

> - What are the essential features of Xanadu that are missing from existing
> hypermedia systems?

This is one of the questions I was attempting to address in the "Xanology"
article, but to sum up, many systems are not sufficiently scalable; some are
crippled in functionality (eg WWW); and none that I am aware of yet have a
simple, elegant royalty and rights clearance solution.

Share and enjoy,
		*** AVATAR ***

-- 
Andrew Pam                                      avatar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Manager, Serious Cybernetics                    avatar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Coordinator, Xanadu Australia                   <http://www.aus.xanadu.com/>
P.O. Box 409, Canterbury VIC 3126 Australia     gopher gopher.aus.xanadu.com