[Cosmo-dev] Sharing format questions

[Morgen Sagen]

On Aug 2, 2006, at 10:04 PM, Elliot Lee wrote:

> Did this go through?
>
> On 8/1/06, Morgen Sagen <morgen at osafoundation.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Jul 31, 2006, at 3:45 PM, Jeffrey Harris wrote:
>>
>> > Hi Folks,
>> >
>> > At OSCON I had lengthy conversations with Bobby and BCM about item
>> > uniqueness and Cosmo, I've been thinking about it since then.
>> >
> [...snip...]
>>
>> I was trying to think through a scenario similar to this, with
>> individual soups, but I got stuck on where to publish new items on a
>> shared collection.  For example, if A shares a calendar with B
>> (granting read-write), and B adds a new event, does it go in A's soup
>> or B's?
>>
>> But as I mentioned last week I do like the notion of individual soups
>> because it means you can annotate any item you want even if you only
>> have read-access to it.  Would we need explicit linking of items, or
>> is it enough that they have the same UUID?
>
> What about just having read-only access? If A shares a calendar with
> B, and B adds a new event, it goes in B's soup. If B chooses to do so,
> B can share the calendar back with A, and A can accept the changes,
> which causes B's new event to be merged into A's version of the
> calendar. You can annotate any item you want, since there's always
> only read-only access.
>
> I guess the linking part could be taken care of when changes are
> shared back. You might be editing the "read-write" calendar offline,
> and then you notify the other user once you're connected again of the
> modifications you've made. So there's no distinguishing read-only and
> read-write, but just sharing. Writing would be by approval of whoever
> owns the calendar to which the change is being written.
>
> This might be a really silly idea, and if so, I apologize. It's just
> something I thought of just now.

I don't think it's a silly idea, and if I understand you correctly  
it's akin to what I mentioned on the 26th:
> Another approach to this would be to let people publish whatever  
> they want to their slice of the soup (hmm, analogy mismatch).  Then  
> it's up to the user to pick and choose whose annotations they  
> "trust", and subscribe to them.  In other words, if I publish an  
> item to my cosmo directory, you could publish an annotation about  
> that item to your own cosmo directory regardless of whether I gave  
> you write access to that item.  It is then up to me whether I want  
> to incorporate your annotations into my repository.

However, as Brian pointed out recently, we should first focus on the  
sharing format and keep the rest of the mechanics the same -- tackle  
this in stages.  These are some really good ideas we've had about how  
to change from a strictly hierarchical storage approach to a more  
virtual "soup" (or even individual soups), and this thread shouldn't  
stop, but I need to hammer out the new sharing format so Cosmo and  
Chandler can start implementing it.  I had put a couple ideas on this  
page:

    http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/ 
SharingFormatDiscussion

...especially the 5A and 5B format choice proposals, but I'm not  
crazy about either of them yet.  Oh, the wiki is down at the moment,  
but hopefully it will be back soon and people can offer suggestions  
for something cleaner.