RE: [Tm4j-developers] Some news and an idea

[Kal A. <ka...@te...>]

>
> Hi Florian,
>
> > Kal, Gerd, I have some news I'd like to mention to you. Not about any
> > progress on the TM4J DOM package (yet), but perhaps worth discussing.
> >
> > OK, the initial news is that I'm back from 3 weeks of training. I
> > have a few certification exams left to take, but at least I'm no
> > longer occupied 100% of the day. So I should be able to make more
> > time for TM4J in the weeks to come, and we'll see some progress on
> > the DOM package in the foreseeable future.
> >
> > The other news is that my current project just bombed. I've been
> > working on a knowledge management project, TM-related, since
> > February. This started out as a college initiative (the "applied
> > science" bit, you know), and was about to be continued as such -- and
> > to hit commercial development -- this fall. Yesterday, two of the
> > five developers involved informed the rest of the team that they were
> > no longer interested (contrary to commitments they had made just
> > three weeks before), and the partner organization is more than likely
> > to go ahead and pursue the same thing with some other development
> > team. Bottom line for me is, I'm out. Bummer.
> >
> > Now, I'm in a situation where a) I don't have a TM project on my
> > hands and b) I don't have a college project on my hands (the latter
> > is mandatory for my coming two semesters). I don't like either of
> > these two facts. :-) Now, I would like to know from you what you are
> > thinking about the following ideas:
> >
> > * For the record, delegate a specific pending task in the TM4J
> > project to me (e.g. work on the DOM package, if we want that),
>
> I don't mind. I guess there also the part of the navigation tool left
> open. Another idea is a query language. I've already started the
> implementation of the Tolog query language, but there are still lot of
> things to do.
>

I would love to see some serious development go into a navigation/editing
tool. I think that such a tool could cover all kinds of interesting areas -
visualisation techniques, topic map "templates" or "schemas" for easier
editing, form-driven editing (perhaps using XUL ?), as well as integrating
querying and automatic topic map generation tools. Lots of scope for lots of
interesting stuff.

> > * File that task as a one-man project with my college (FHS
> > Informationsberufe, Eisenstadt, Austria) with a projected 200
> > man-hours total amount of work -- that's the default for what they
> > consider a 9-month project, believe it or not. The number is totally
> > ludicrous, and is one of dozens of strange rules imposed by our PHB.
> > They always want lots of paper, status reports, and MS project files
> > to make the whole thing look like what they think is a professional
> > project.
> >
> > Now, all of this is, as of yet, totally unofficial, and if at all
> > possible, will definitely require a lot of negotiation with the
> > college on my part and a bit of paperwork on your part. But I would
>
> Which kind of paperwork ?
>
> > like to know if, provided I manage to get all obstacles out of the
> > way, you would be interested in actually taking that course of
> > action.
> >
> > I fully understand that all this is happening a bit suddenly -- after
> > all, I've appeared in the TM4J project out of the blue just a few
> > weeks ago and none of you have had the chance of really getting to
> > know me. So absolutely no hard feelings if I get a no-go. :-) But if
> > you guys are thinking this is a feasible idea, please let me know as
> > soon as you can. I'd have to start contacting the college
> > administration ASAP and see if I can get them to approve. My classes
> > start on September 17, and if we want to do this, I should aim at
> > reaching some sort of productive stage by October 1.
>
> Best Regards,
> Gerd
>
> --
> ________________________________________________________________
> Gerd Mueller                                    ge...@sm...
> SMB GmbH                                  http://www.smb-tec.com
>
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