Regarding other activities

I like what Patrick says. Back in the hayday of Doug Engelbart hanging out at SRI on Tuesday evenings following the UnRev II lectures, we got started talking about distributed documents, and Lee Iverson created something called DDom -- distributed DOM. Nothing ever came of it, but GODDAG looks like it. Nice to see it out in the public domain.

You may recall that Graham Moore, back in around 2000, at Extreme Markup, started a project Grove4J which was based on a rant I started there: it's time for a damn good grove implementation in Java. About all that's there is an API. Project seems to have died.

Lee Iverson took all that we understood about groves, authentication, permissions, etc, and started NODAL which is continuously under development.

NODAL is designed as a general, document-oriented distributed database with a data model that allows addressing, searching and linking of content of any kind from any document. The data model defines documents as directed graphs of content nodes and provides adaptable addressing, security, privacy and version control at the granularity of these nodes. Moreover, it is built on a distributed client-server (or peer-to-peer) communication model that seamlessly shifts from synchronous, real-time interaction to asynchronous or intermittently-connected interaction. Finally, it is designed to extensibly, support a wide range of input and output formats so that it will interoperate easily with systems using existing standard document formats and exchange protocols, including even applications unaware of its existence. It is hoped that this simple system will become a standard, universal component of the infrastructure of information management and exchange and thus allow for flexible, productive collaboration between willing people for any purpose, anywhere, using any tools.