HistoryOfAskemos

The Eary Days - Incentives

The history of Askemos began in 1993. I just spent approximately 13 year with computers as a hobby and later as undergraduate at the university. One observation bothered me: there are so many "computer illiterates" who admit that they don't understand the computer world. Among them people like my own dad, who received two Ph D's and is usually regarded to be a smart man. So I posited that it's not the peoples fault, but the computers, which provide notions which don't fit the concepts people need to think.

It turned out, for instance, that one example of a near miss is the notion of a file, where data typically is kept. If we compare that concept with "things we can write on" as found in history, it compares more to a slate or white board that to a sheet of paper, because we can wipe the text out reuse the space. But slates are only used for special purposes and far outnumbered by text written at paper, which is not reusable. Since paper was invented there where so many cycles of invention that we definately had reusable paper in the stores if that was the better concept. The reason for reusability was scarcity and not the better concept.

A simillar problem exists with the urge to put every idea into a hirarchy on computers, while a network (like a MindMap) fits much better. Once (1999) for instance I did consulting with I B M. The department lost a couple of thousend dollars in effort trying to agree upon a naming scheme for their documentation. My claim that everybody should be able to have their own naming, which fits their job duties was unheard. Finally they decided a scheme but many employees used their own scheme while working and just checked their results in when done - or forgot about it rushing to the next job and causing another loss.

Not too far from this "compulsion problem" was the babylon of programming languages. Virtually all of them are just different expression of the same concept in terms of character sequences. But we can still write bad code in any language. So what are they good for? Representation independance is needed - we have it already, if a human brain can understand the code, or does anybody believe that we store ascii characters in the head?

Distributed Data and Trade - The Market Move

Around 1997 the development of distributed file systems like freenet became visible. Besides beeing concerned with update issues, which could easily beeing avoided if they did not try to resemble a concept invented to deal with the scarcity of hard disk space in 1970, they point towards a different need: The integrity of the data must be ensured and data kept available despite physical attacks, lost devices and DataErosion. Looking closer at the concept, we find it very simillar to the situation of the internet before the advent of the web. A lot of data stored at some point. Before at ftp servers, now at freenet nodes. It's the same situation, we miss the dynamic content. So the decision was to develop a scheme for dynamic content under the assumtion that we already had usable a distributed file system.

Two years later the world moved at a related front to unify their data representation with XML. From the post graduate studies I knew that it's predecessor SGML is already able to represent the three aspects of expressions (data, meta data and context - as the linguists know them). SGML was just too complex, because of superflous concepts. Now we had a repesentation independant data format and knew before that it will win because it fits the purpose and has publicity.

With the development of the web it became visible that not only the computer geeks form their own community on the net. Communities are ultimately defined by the common interest of their members and a way to communicate and exchange. By now we can find plenty of web sites, mail lists and chat rooms. Their users depend ultimately on their service providers. Exchange, or trade activities, can not afford to depend on service providers, they call for fine control over transferable rights to use the property (IntellectualProperty here) in a tamper proofed virtual data cloud. The data cloud may depend on as many service providers as their owner feels needed.

Year 2000 - The Big Step

In March 2000 I felt that I collected enough requirements and background to develop the 0.6 version of the Askemos server. Beeing the 6^th prototype it' now mature enough for actual deployment. (The 0.4 version is still in commercial use, but has shortcommings due to short sighted requirements as mentioned above.) It was finally released to the public at 23^th december 2000. This version solves most of the requirements:

• Provides objects, messages, topology and protection.
• A protection system to be proud of. With no systematic need of administrative power and as many local administrators as needed.
• All objects, ranging from invariants (like deeds) to complex applications, are autonomous (which means "write protected against any other object"). They can be understood as closures of a side effect free function and some data.
• Topology: Objects exists at places in a network. Hirarchies are just a special case.
• Objects answer to messages as an atomic operation.
• Message flow can be formally modelled with petri nets.
• Optimized for XML structured data (which is stored in parsed tree form, not serialized).
• Web user interface