what’s CyNet?

Cynet is a proposal to build a system/network able to organize information and create links between documents, concepts, ideas and people.
It spreads across a part of Internet and a part of human/social space.

Actually, the schema proposed is minimalistic and doesn’t depend from a final view of the system¹, the aim being to allow self-organisation and independent evolution based on a few simple principles and directed by selective pressures represented by the pertinence of intermediary results.

CyNet is biomimetic, the equivalent of a biosphere, populated by autonomous elements.

CyNet is distributed, and there is no need of a central service to support it; but dedicated servers could improve some of it’s functions².
A distributed model is a warranty for persistence, independently of the fate of persons, associations or compagnies supporting it. To strengthen this, CyNet doesn’t require any particular operating system or programmatic language but may use any existing one or be adapted for those to come³.

¹ • this isn’t totally true, I do have a small idea of what I’m expecting from CyNet, but there is enough room for surprises, and that’s what I’m expecting the more; this is not intelligent design of a system but design of an intelligent system.

² • ITmimetics are widely spread and CyNet like services may appear in a more centralized mode, facilitating the control necessary to sustain business models. This is facilitated by the fact that CyNet is available under the less restrictive of the Creative Commons license. But there is a couple of hidden business models that could be used without competition to the central idea

³ • “persistence” is the main motto for CyNet

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Cynet est un projet pour la création d’un système/réseau apte a organiser de l’information et créer des liens entre documents, concepts, idées et personnes
Il couvre partiellement Internet et l’espace humain/social.

En fait, le schéma proposé est minimaliste et ne dépend pas d’une vue de son état final1, l’objectif étant de permettre l’auto-organisation et l’évolution indépendante, basées sur quelques principes simples et dirigées par la pression de sélection représentée par la pertinence de résultats intermédiaires.

CyNet est biomimétique, l’équivalent d’une biosphère, peuplée d’éléments indépendants.

CyNet est distribué, et il n’y a pas besoin d’un service central pour le soutenir; mais des serveurs dédiés pourraient améliorer certaines de ses fonctions.2

Un modèle distribué est une garantie de perennité, indépendamment du devenir des personnes, associations ou sociétés qui le soutiennent. Pour consolider ceci, CyNet n’a pas besoin d’un système d’exploitation ou langage de programmation particuliers mais peut se servir de ceux existants ou s’adapter à ceux à venir3

¹ • ce n’est pas entièrement vrai, j’ai bien une idée de ce que j’attends de CyNet, mais il reste de la place pour des surprises et c’est ce que j’attends le plus; ce n’est pas de la conception intelligente d’un système, c’est de la conception d’un système intelligent

² • les ITmimetics sont largement répandus et des services ressemblants à CyNet pourraient apparaître adoptant un mode plus centralisé pour faciliter le contrôle nécessaire à certains business-models. Ceci sera facilité par le fait que CyNet est disponible sous la licence la moins restrictive de Creative Commons. Mais il y a bien deux business models cachés qui peuvent être utilisés sans entrer en compétition avec l’idée centrale

³ • “persistence” est le mot clé pour CyNet

CyNet v0.5

Despite the fact that I was preparing version 0.7 of CyNet’s description, I will put it away, at least for some time, and come back to publish version 0.5.1; that is rewriting and I think it is necessary to discuss some of the features I wanted to insert; I’m not quite sure that I always made the right choices

In a first time I will describe the constitutive elements and relations between them, then I will present the integration of the system and some of the strategies that could be used to set it up progressively.

Despite the fact that CyNet is perfectly clear in my mind, it is particularly difficult to write down a clear description of the vision and I hate fuzzy ones as they may be misinterpreted.
Sometime neologisms will be necessary; naming objects is easy, as a description is sufficient; naming concepts will be a little bit more difficult, as descriptions may be of the fuzzy kind.

should/could be

CyNet’s design is at it’s at an early stage, describing how it “could be” rather then “should be”.I wonder if that will be possible to build it up keeping the “could be” attitude, thus providing the possibility for end users to create and use their own formats.

I spent a few hours to study the possibilities offered by Transilerature and the new document format Nelson proposed.
The questions was: is it usable for CyNet and if yes what adjustments would be necessary?

The answers are simple enough to present them in a single post: yes and nothing to change

In fact, Cycells were designed to be able to use any existing document format as seed, but I see that any new document format may be used as well, there aren’t any restrictions. It’s simple enough to add a document type in the list; in fact the first use of any new document type will automatically trigger the addiion, without any other action necessary.

Web 4.0 & more

I had two parallel discussions by IM, one about CyNet and the second with Joachim about “various”.

Since SunG was commenting on CyNet, and me trying to convince her that this had nothing to do with the Web 2.0 buzz(#), Joachim asked about the text to be used to link here.

My first reaction was “blah blah ?” Always considering that my public blogs’ contents are of the “blah” type. Then, to mark a clear distinction between the Web 2.0 buzz and attached business plans and stuff and staff, I proposed “this is the starting point of Web 3.0 !”.
Simply because I don’t clearly understand what the Web 2.0 is about and I prefer to go to the next step; that is machines’ independence for creative action[s].

Then spontaneously I added: “make it 4.0, more impressive “, thinking that this would add buzz. This gave that.

transliterature, post-reading

Transliterature is much about the traceability of Human ideas manifest[ing] as text, connections, diagrams and more: thus how to store them and present them is a crucial issue [...]

I love this first release of what is presented as an agenda and a fairly complete sketch [, with] no delivery dates.

There is some dense neurons juice in there.

Some of the preliminary statements may be discussed as not perfectly accurate, but the generalization proposed in the schema is much more powerful then anything existing already, and, more important, the document format is open.

A lot have to be done to get it to the end-user (the kind I represent) and I hate reading phrases as those found on the The TransQuoter™ download page:

• Mac and Linux versions need execution from a command line. We offer Andrew Pam’s instructions; we regret that the Mac instructions aren’t simplified yet to an icon-click.
• Sorry– we do not presently supply an EDL editor, but if you’re clever you can do it by hand, adjusting the numbers on at the end of each span URL and feeding them to the Transquoter to check the result.

Because I’m the not clever, icon-clicker. Will have to come back later to see if there is something for me

Transliterature

The public availability of Transliterature description and associated software, make me think that I should start discussing about CyNet publicly. Despite the fact that the two concepts differ substantially they tend to reach the same degree of agglutination of information.

I had some messages spotting the Xanadu project when I started presenting the Semantic Internet. One of them, from Calion, said :

This sounds a whole lot like Xanadu. No need to reinvent the wheel…

I do agree with this statement. What I was describing was a lot like Xanadu and when I heard the first time about Transliterature I was expecting that the evolution would have lead others to the same path I followed while describing CyNet [pdf, CyNet v0.4]. This isn’t the case. So I feel that that make some sense to continue developing it.

So, here we go!

Hey!

I wonder what is the percentage of people with Golden Tickets for a WordPress blog.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away you entered your email address on http://wordpress.com/ to get a blog.
We’re now inviting small groups to use WordPress.com and your email address was selected today!

And despite the fact that I’m quite satisfied with Blogger, I decided to give it a try. Why not? And I think Joachim will be glad to see that I’m trying WordPress.

As the interface is in english I started spontaneously writing in english, so I’ll continue that way.
I intended to create a new blog to present gradually the CyNet project, and since I’m on the way to translate the first public document in french, english should remain the main language to discuss about CyNet. I had opted for Chinese or Spanish, but I don’t know them. [maybe I should ask for help on that]. The Semantic Internet blog is dead

So Cynet’s nest will be here, as long as the place is free. Otherwise I’m moving to Blogger again.