[AgileWiki] rolonic structures

[Bill la F. <bil...@su...>]

I wrote the following in answer to a query from a developer. I thought 
it might be helpful.

Bill

Rolonics is a theory of knowledge based in part on holonics. We break 
the world into rolons rather than objects. And every rolon has four 
aspects: wholness, partness, state and history.

You could say that rather than have just data and metadata, we subdivide 
data int ledger (state) and journal (changes/history), and subdivide 
metadata into descriptors (behavior/wholeness) and classifiers 
(relationships/partness).

The structures then are very simple. Each rolon can have a document 
(multi-line ascii text), and entries (name/value pairs). There are three 
kinds of entries: classifier, descriptor and ledger. There is also a 
rich set of relationships supported. Right now we've only got a few to 
start with:

A rolon can have children (rolons).
A rolon can have parents (rolons).
A rolon can have ledger sections (rolons).
A rolon can have a descriptor unit (rolon) which defines its type and 
defines common behavior.
A rolon can have journal sections (rolons) which describe every change 
that has been made to that rolon.

And of course, everything is recursive in multiple dimensions. So a 
rolon can have a descriptor unit which has a ledger section which has a 
journal section which has a descriptor unit. It looks simple at first 
glance, and it really is simple. But it is a very rich system.

These are only the basic structures. We've built a wiki on this, and the 
next step is to build up an application platform.

Additionally, a rolon can have classifier sections (rolons) of about 5 
different types for defining more interesting relationships. These were 
implemented in the prototype (AgileWiki2) in Python, but AgileWiki3 
(intended to be a fast production system) isn't there yet.