Discussion Thread

[Ivan R. Judson]

I think you mean "When we have billions of venues it's going to be hard
to keep track of them and/or find content." That's not topology, that's
meta-information, your suggestions include "organize by subject" (yellow
pages), "search and index" (googlebot), "organize by name" (white
pages). This is all content organization, which is a discovery problem,
not topology. 

The web does not limit the number of links between pages, which might be
the closest analogy to our problem. The web does allow you to go
directly to any page (which we currently don't allow because it's not
consistent with the spatial metaphor).  These are what I see the crux of
the issue to be talking with Sean about why he built his venue server
the way he did. 

So the question needs to be thought about more, but I think it's
something we need to think about after 2.0 is ready to go. It's good to
have it in email so we can go back and revisit the issue once we deliver
on our promises. We're currently at least one quarter, perhaps two
behind on our deliverables, and have SC coming up with nothing to show.

--Ivan

..........
Ivan R. Judson .~. http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~judson
Futures Laboratory .~.  630 252 0920
Argonne National Laboratory .~. 630 252 6424 Fax
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ag-dev at mcs.anl.gov 
> [mailto:owner-ag-dev at mcs.anl.gov] On Behalf Of Rick Stevens
> Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2002 4:38 AM
> To: Terry Disz; Ag-Dev at Mcs. Anl. Gov; Hereld at Mcs. Anl. Gov
> Subject: Re: Discussion Thread
> 
> 
> I think we need multiple ways of addressing this.
> 
> Search engines
> Directory Services
> Maps (overlays that provide navigable links to multiple venue 
> servers) Public Plaza's that folks can connect too.
> 
> I dont see any of these as being inconsistent with the 
> metaphor.. in fact 
> we have equivalents of all of these in the real world
> 
> At 11:48 PM 9/11/2002 -0500, Terry Disz wrote:
> >This mail list ought to be good for more than just sending 
> attachments, 
> >and since we are all having a hard time being in the same 
> place at the 
> >same time, I thought I would try and start a discussion thread.
> >
> >What I want to discuss is scalability, in terms of what do 
> we do if the 
> >AG becomes really successful and there are bazillions of venues, or 
> >more. I think this discussion is important because any possible 
> >solutions go directly to Venue requirements and I don't want 
> us to miss 
> >a requirement because we didn't think hard enough about this problem.
> >
> >So, here's the issue - we at Argonne have been promoting the 
> idea that 
> >venues should be linked with door-like objects, and we can navigate 
> >from venue to venue, just like the MUD. Although this can be 
> fun, and 
> >can be interesting in a social-experiment way, it's easy to see that 
> >this doesn't scale very well when we start to talk about 
> hundreds, let 
> >alone bazillions of interconnected venues. Without 
> structure, it would 
> >quickly become impossible to find things and use the venues 
> to conduct 
> >business.
> >
> >Although we have a stake in this idea, I think it might be a little 
> >wobbly and I wonder if we shouldn't be talking about 
> alternatives, or 
> >at least about ways of imposing or discovering structure  in 
> a network 
> >of linked venues.
> >
> >Looking to some of our users, I know of at least two who 
> operate venue 
> >servers that have just a list of venues that users can choose and be 
> >directly ported there. This idea of an index on a set of 
> venues and a 
> >method of jumping directly to one seems to be attractive to some. I 
> >know, transiting venues is a fairly heavy operation today, 
> but I think 
> >the problem goes deeper and these other solutions would still exist 
> >even if transiting were fast, as with the MUD today.
> >
> >Other ideas on what to do for scalability are;
> >1. dispatch venue-discovery bots to create a database to answer 
> >google-search questions 2. Create a set of Yellow pages to help find 
> >venues by purpose. 3. Create a set of white pages to help 
> find venues 
> >by name.
> >
> >
> >Put on your thinking caps -  what about scalability? How do 
> we provide 
> >it? What requirements do these solutions have for the venue? 
> What are 
> >your ideas?
> >
> >Terry
>