On Wed, Mar 21, 2007 at 04:07:10PM -0400, Reed Hedges wrote: > > Walking into a presentation and saying "A focus of the VOS platform will > > be on interoperability with existing systems" makes people ears perk up, > > Right, though that's a hard thing to promise. Maybe "we're willing to > make VOS interoperable with other systems as required, and here are a > few we've already done: x, y, z." > > To add the it's-not-cookie-cutters part: "you can organize your data in > whataver way fits with your need, and while this requires a bit more > work to actually do that, all the features and tools and other automatic > bits will still work."
It's true. The advantages to VOS seem to be that it gives you a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach to data structures; you can smoosh several data models together into the same logical object on the fly. Among other things this means that you can avoid "slicing" whereby data specific to one data model is lost in translation because the target data model doesn't support it and doesn't have room for it. In the VOS case, you translate what you can into standard object types, but can also attach your extended data and leave it there until you need it later when writing out the data to the original format. Now, this isn't perfect (there could be data dependencies which arn't maintained if the standard data is changed without updating the extended data) but it's light years better than what most people are doing. > > Also, last night I came up with a new analogy for VOS: > > "XML for Objects" > > > > Meaning, essentially, in the way that XML provides a meta-syntax for > > documents and enables a galaxy of tools and applications that can > > process them, VOS could provide a meta-framework for applications to > > interact, and similarly enable a galaxy of tools and applications that > > can interoperate with them. > > It's an OK analogy but only if you don't then start applying assumptions > to VOS based on what XML is for and what it's restrictions are. Right. I'd only use this analogy with someone who already has a vague idea that VOS is about communicating objects and not documents. -- [ Peter Amstutz ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ] [Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet] [ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ] [ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey: pgpkeys.mit.edu 18C21DF7 ]
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