Project Xanadu
Xanadu is a 1960 founded hypertext project by Ted Nelson; by, named after the legendary place Xanadu project should arise the Docuverse, a universal library with countless interconnected documents.
The hypertext concept of Xanadu is relatively complex; For example, a Transklusions mechanism is provided, can be incorporated into a document with the parts of other objects seamlessly. In addition, in Xanadu a billing model was always provided, similar to the newer approaches of micropayments.
Concept
As the World Wide Web was intended Xanadu as a remote storage system for documents. Each document in Nelson's hypertext space should have an absolutely unique address (regardless of location). Should be directly addressable from elsewhere within the document itself individual characters. Documents Nelson proved to be indelible entries in a global database before. I mean we can, so the idea to publish a new version, but the old version of the same document was available, and differences between the two versions would be made visible easily. Belong together documents should be in parallel windows, so-called transpointing Windows, including the connections displayed between.
References
References should be bi-directional; if you looked at a page in Xanadu, so you should also see what other pages referenced on this site. Instead of the usual on the Web " copy & paste " the simple copying of content, should the addresses of the content to the point where they are used, are inserted. So if you, for example, cites a book, you would simply specify the address ( ie, the globally unique number of the book and the number of characters to be quoted ) insert at the appropriate place, not the citation text itself (so-called transclusion ). The client ( the Xanadu equivalent to the web browser ) would then insert the corresponding data in the right place.
Pros and Cons
Quotes automatically stay up to date, if desired, their authenticity can not be guaranteed, you can request the context of a quote immediately, and copyright can be reimbursed in the background if necessary without much effort. Nelson was already looking for solutions to the problem of compensation in the digital age, when hardly anyone was at all aware about its existence.
Instead of tedious to pursue any rights violation, documents in Xanadu should be so cheap that you do not notice their pay. Fractional cents should be paid for the recovery of a document within another, and because of the system of direct addressing of content instead of their copying such recovery operations would remain detectable, unless you bypassed the system with intention. "I would like to live in a world in which there is no copyright, but as things are now even not ," says Nelson - and calls his alternative model Trans copyright. Essential for it to be able to transmit small amounts between users economically.
Implementation
Xanadu failed because of its complexity. The system was never completed; today there are only prototypes. Nelson had studied philosophy at Harvard University, and was not technically versed enough to implement the system on its own or to support others in the implementation.
In 1988 the company Autodesk 80 % of XOC where Ted Nelson to 1992 worked on Xanadu. After that, the project was continued until 1998 at Keio University in Japan. As a basis Ted Nelson developed there, among other things, the ZigZag data structure. 1999 it was decided to release the source code under the name Udanax. The programmed in a Smalltalk dialect software has been partially ported from David Jones in Abora project to Java. The current development version of Xanadu (2009) is managed by Andrew David Pam, who joined as a student at Keio University on the project.