One consistent message that came out of the LIXI Industry Forum was that members want us to "do more". The precise nature of the more we should be doing is a little harder to discern but, clearly, LIXI's achievements to date have simply whetted everyone's appetites. The problem from my perspective as the guy who's got to find a way to deliver on all these heightened expectations is that LIXI's productivity over recent times has been trending down, not up. The greater the range and complexity of the processes LIXI impacts, and the greater the numbers of implementations of LIXI-compliant systems, the harder it is to make sure that new initiatives don't adversely effect past initiatives. Ironically LIXI has a legacy problem. And unfortunately that's just one of quite a number of problems that add up to a real headache if the goal is to enable LIXI to deliver more and to deliver faster.
A short while back I put together a short document outlining the situation as I see it and a possible solution. Download repositioning_lixi_1_1.pdf A little bit radical-looking at first sight but my feeling is that we have to do something, and if not this than what? (That's not a rhetorical question by the way - I'm genuinely interested to hear alternative suggestions.)
The status of my proposal at this point is that I've circulated it a bit informally and at least some LIXI Board members have read it. Generally speaking the feedback has been positive but with something this important I think we need as wide an audience as possible, and ideally that audience will speak up to let the LIXI Board and myself know what they think. Happy reading!
I think this is a great idea that has the potential to marry the best of text-based bottom-up coauthoring with serious structured data and controlled vocabularies that are usually created in a top-down manner! I wonder maybe the glue is some matured semantic web approaches (e.g. RDF) to link the the two worlds with some more innovative version control. :-)
Posted by: Liming Zhu | November 02, 2007 at 11:49 AM
Thumbs up. Could CreativeCommons be a ready mixed solution to some of the licencing issues.
And I vote MediaWiki for the tool to start bringing this to life.
http://creativecommons.org/
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki/
Posted by: Paul Bridgestock | November 07, 2007 at 01:28 PM