Re: SIMILE Research Drivers

On Mon, Apr 07, 2003 at 12:54:54PM -0400, John S. Erickson wrote:
> 
> Kevin asks:
> > So the question I am left with is: why do you think
> > that Simile clients should not be limited to web browsers?
> 
> Well, for one thing, the Haystack client is not technically a "web browser"
> 

I agree of course.  

Still this is the first suggestion I've seen that the Haystack
client would be used with Simile.  My impression was rather that
the Haystack UI would be ported, minus the client, using a Web UI
interface.

> I think that we need to accomodate virtualization of the storage that the
> client interacts with. This storage should be assumed to be highly
> distributed, and will include resources that are locally stored (relative to
> the user). The purpose for this localization might be for performance reasons,
> and/or because the user's activity simply suggests that being "close" to the
> physical context makes the most sense.
> 
> There could be reasons of control as well --- the user/client might be
> modifying a set of resources and thus (a) has a local copy and (b) causes a
> "lock" on "server" copies.

This is an interesting idea, but as the client code won't be under the 
control of the user, it seems impractical to require that virtualization
happen at the client/server interface rather than at the server/server
interface.   

If I'm wrong and client code /is/ intended to be run by the user directly
then a client library that can span multiple repositories takes on a 
greater significance, as well as implying the need for a corresponding 
web-service API on the server end.  This, assuming that DSpace hosts 
aren't likely to want to expose the RDF database layer directly to their 
non-local clients.

I would suggest that there is little need for that style of interaction
with the Simile server however.  The distribution use cases for Simile
(Shared Collections, Open Courseware) seem to rest on data sharing at the 
peer level rather than at the client level.  

Cheers,
-kls
-- 
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   Kevin Smathers                kevin.smathers@hp.com    
   Hewlett-Packard               kevin@ank.com            
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Received on Monday, 7 April 2003 14:49:28 UTC