It's a kind of belated consolation that people are finally waking up to the potential of transclusion, structured notetaking and active reading in assisting and boosting human intelligence, decades after the onset of the still unfulfilled visions of forefathers such as Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart; and it's definitely great to see skillful people working on the vastly unpopular field of general-purpose production software of the literary kind. But this is just the thing that ideally shouldn't be productized and shut into the walled garden of an iPad application, unable to flexibly integrate into a user's broader systems of knowledge and memory. Hopefully the technology will have much more extensive implementations beyond the application.
We should have had this kind of thing as a standard part of our common user-facing software by now; in all software related to reading and writing. All implemented in free software, open protocols and standards, in a distributed manner, not tied to one company or organization. In 2012, I should have been able to practically link a paragraph of my comment here to a line on a local PDF file, another paragraph on that file to a particular portion of a web video, and string a group of such links and transclusions together, comment further on them, keep them under version control, and share them with others, without being tied to a single service or application. This stuff should be infrastructure.
And this is what personal computers were supposed to be all about, before the original naive and optimistic vision of enhancing human intelligence and distributed production and sharing gave way to the current situation where personal computers are used mainly to mindlessly consume centrally produced crap. I'm still looking forward to and willing to work towards an updated variant of that vision, but it's going to be an uphill battle.
I assume you mean recent and active projects; there's nothing recent I can remember that attempts to do the kind of thing I tried to describe in the second paragraph of my comment. (Which is why I intend to start working on my own modest, desperate attempt at it in the following months.)
However, there are various projects, some of them historical, that have attempted to tackle it in limited contexts, or implemented parts of it, or have envisioned it in holistic systems that are now outdated. Almost all of the somewhat interesting ones I've come across can unfortunately be classified as one of the following: 1) Productized, narrowly focused yet-another-app 2) Academic or overly specialized in-house or personal project with no real effort at widespread usability 3) Unmaintained and outdated 4) Essentially vaporware
With that said, here are a few links of interest, with the forefathers noted first:
I'm in the preliminary research phase, and it's too early to tell. But I'm investigating the feasibility of using the Open Annotation data model (draft: http://openannotation.org/spec/core/), which they are also basing their work on, so the possibility is open.
Thanks for the link; I've been out of touch with his writing for some time. It's good to be reminded.
As for help, I'm going to need much of it once things materialize. It's going to be free (as in freedom) software, and contributions will be essential; but I don't intend to release anything until the initial architecture is settled and I have a working, dogfoodable version 0.1. And if I fail to create the necessary living conditions for focusing on the project, that can take a while.
I hope you don't mind me contacting you when that celebrated time comes. And if anyone is interested in updates or would like to discuss related matters, feel free to say hello at the email at the address in my profile. (Some folks already have; thank you.)
I have to wonder if something like this, tied to Google Glasses, might not make a great interface for using the things we do everyday to classify our world for ourselves, into tagged and meaningful links to be reused by others.
We should have had this kind of thing as a standard part of our common user-facing software by now; in all software related to reading and writing. All implemented in free software, open protocols and standards, in a distributed manner, not tied to one company or organization. In 2012, I should have been able to practically link a paragraph of my comment here to a line on a local PDF file, another paragraph on that file to a particular portion of a web video, and string a group of such links and transclusions together, comment further on them, keep them under version control, and share them with others, without being tied to a single service or application. This stuff should be infrastructure.
And this is what personal computers were supposed to be all about, before the original naive and optimistic vision of enhancing human intelligence and distributed production and sharing gave way to the current situation where personal computers are used mainly to mindlessly consume centrally produced crap. I'm still looking forward to and willing to work towards an updated variant of that vision, but it's going to be an uphill battle.