LIXItech: LIXIpedia

I spent the afternoon a couple of days ago with the guys at NICTA looking more closely at the "LIXIpedia" concept (as first mentioned on this blog here). For those that haven't read the proposal document the basic idea is to change LIXI from being a top-down, consensus-driven and chronically slow institution into something dramatically more responsive. The way I'm suggesting we do this is by turning the LIXI Vocabulary into something like Wikipedia, where everyone gets the chance to add whatever they think the Vocabulary needs. Sounds nutty at first but I'm not suggesting an uncontrolled free-for-all - there would be rules to keep things sensible.

The point of the session at NICTA was to kick off a research project to figure out exactly how a LIXIpedia would work in practice. It's an interesting experience to sit in a room full of Ph.D's all saying, "yes, but..." about your pet idea. Thankfully the concept (and I) survived the experience, though it certainly gave me plenty to think about. Some of that thinking can now be found in a new version of the proposal document, available here. Probably the single most significant change is that it's become clear that Wikipedia is not an ideal analogy. In the Wikipedia world there is one current truth, albeit one that changes constantly, whereas what we need is support for multiple concurrent truths. For example if one or more LIXI members want to change the definition of "Address" I believe they should be able to do so, but the original meaning of "Address" must continue as an equally valid term in the Vocabulary to support all the members still happy with the old definition. In other words, the rule needs to be that you can add pages to the LIXIpedia but you can't change existing ones. If you add a page by copying and modifying an existing page that, practically speaking, requires a kind of versioning - not because the parentage of a page matters, but so you can keep using meaningful names. For example the element "Address" needs to automatically increment from "Address_0" to "Address_1", "Address_2" etc. as people create more LIXIpedia entries that are intended to capture address data. But this isn't really the right place to get into the finer details. If you're interested please read the proposal, and if you have any opinion about it or suggestions for improvement you are welcome to post comments here.

BTW, the name "LIXIpedia" is just a working title and not a very good one at that. The imperfect analogy with Wikipedia is only one of its problems. We really need a different name that could allow for the fact that a shared, collaboratively-edited vocabulary for financial services e-commerce could easily end up covering a lot more than just the lending industry. Maybe we should run a contest to find a better name. I'll start things off by offering my old 2nd gen iPod as a prize. I'm pretty sure it still works.

Comments

Speaking of maintaining multiple versions of truth and using usage frequency as popularity metrics , I reckon the more appropriate analogies could be:
1. folksonomy (LIXIonomy/Finonomy/EC-ONOMY) :-)
2. microformat: Although microformat started as micro-standards for HTML (again a popularity contest in reality), there are discussions on what "microformats for XML" means and using XLink as the mechanism.

Posted by: Liming Zhu | November 26, 2007 at 08:58 AM