OSCOMAK Introduction, History, and Challenges
Paul D. Fernhout
Bryan forwarded something by me a week ago related to the OpenVirgle
discussion group. :-) As I wrote in that forwarded note: "I'm glad to see
more and more people are getting excited about "open manufacturing" whatever
it is called. I'm tracking the openmanufacturing list but I get so excited
every time I read any bit of it I can't read it all or post anything if that
makes any sense. :-)"
By way of introduction, I've long been interested in a project I now call
"OSCOMAK" for an acronym to stick in an (unfunded) NASA proposal about ten
years ago.
The OSCOMAK acronym expansion is currently moving somewhere from:
"The Open Source Community On Manufacturing Knowledge"
to the recursive and overly complex:
"OSCOMAK Semantically-interlinked Communities Organizing
Manufacturing-related Know-how"
An older site with some of the NASA proposal's contents.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/index.htm
About twenty years ago I called it "Stella" for "Sunrise sustainable
technology library". Here is an example of my writings back when I wrote a
little more with the enthusiasm, optimism, and even hyping of someone like
Bryan. :-) True, I did have a HyperCard stack about a greenhouse at least,
and I did "weasel" behind the phrase "when operational". :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
From:
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/081919dbba30d1f7
"The Sunrise Sustainable Technology Institute helps people give creatively
in the field of technology. SSTI develops a public domain library of
technology (STELLA) compatible with long term human survival in style. SSTI
deploys this knowledge to allow people freedom to design their built
environments. When operational, the Sunrise sustainable technology library
(Stella) is more than a catalogue of technology. It contains the web of
interrelations between technological artifacts. For example, consider a
greenhouse made of plastic sheets covering an aluminum frame. Stella can
tell you all the tools, materials, and skills needed to make such a
greenhouse by presenting pictures of them on a computer display. Stella can
then let you pick any component and trace all the things needed to make it.
Through this process, Stella allows you to explore the entire web of
technology. But Stella can do more than help you explore. Stella can help
you design. Stella allows you to design a new type of greenhouse. Stella
can help you figure out what components go into the new greenhouse design.
This is done using a user-friendly graphical computer interface where you
can see a picture of the greenhouse as you design it. Stella can print out
plans for this new design. However, Stella can do more than design a thing
in isolation. Stella can help you design an entire technology base to
manufacture, assemble, repair, and dispose of greenhouses. Stella allows
you to track every material used in the greenhouse's construction and what
becomes of it at every stage in the life of the greenhouse. Further, Stella
can help you design the entire web of technology you would need to do all of
this to whatever degree of self reliance you desire. Stella can show you
what tools and materials you need to import and export from your selected
subset of the entire web of technology. Using Stella, Sunrise is developing
a technological web to allow the Institute to rely on sustainable technology
for 90% of its operations. Sustainable technology is technology that can be
used indefinitely without harm to the environment and which can be recycled
or disposed of without environmental damage. Every system developed or
adapted will be put into Stella and made public domain for anyone to use.
These systems would eventually include housing, food production, paper use,
energy use, transportation, communications, and computing. Stella would be
used to assess priorities and degrees of sustainability for all the
technology the institute relies on."
There was a related Zope&Plone-based site I called "Freevolution" a few
years ago which I took down (in part from too many attacks against it as an
unmanaged site).
Here is the current OSCOMAK site, powered by a Halo Semantic MediaWiki:
http://www.oscomak.net/
http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Main_Page
I'm not too keen on the Halo Semantic MediaWiki long term though, for
reasons I'd be happy to discuss in terms of pros and cons. Related
discussions from the OpenVirgle list:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/search?group=openvirgle&q=semantic
OSCOMAK's realization was prompted more than anything by discussions
relating to Google's Virgle April Fool's joke.
http://www.google.com/virgle/
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle
Nothing like a huge corporation poking fun (mostly good natured) at your
dream to get you riled up a bit. :-)
But OSCOMAK/Stella is still more of a dream than an ongoing community. This
is not meant to discount recent discussions and contributions by people like
Bryan and Mike and Doram on the OpenVirgle list or the OSCOMAK Wiki. But, by
contrast, Appropedia,
http://www.appropedia.org/
for example, is much more a significant community, including having made a
formal non-profit, even if their scope and technology platform are somewhat
different than OSCOMAK's. The LUF organization is also more ongoing.
http://theluf.blogspot.com/
Or the P2P foundation:
http://p2pfoundation.net/The_Foundation_for_P2P_Alternatives
And Makezine, and a bunch of others like are mentioned on the LUF blog.
OSCOMAK is still a little different in focus from all these (more general
than Appropedia or LUF as it subsumes both ideals, and less general than the
P2P foundation in some ways, yet going beyond it in others.) But each of
LUF, Appropedia, and P2P Foundation have communities going. So do some other
sites.
The change from "Community" in the old version of the OSCOMAK name to
"Communities" in a newer version reflects the reality of many people now
doing this kind of work in various ways and needing to coordinate it somehow
(kind of like a Doug Engelbart "Meta-NIC"). How much of the rest changes is
still in flux. So, I'm trying to rethink the meaning of OSCOMAK and my work
in the context of all the great projects going on right now and being
discussed here.
Not much has really changed for OSCOMAK as an idea in the last decade,
except the rest of the world is catching up, :-) like with people using RDF
triples now instead of Pointrel triples,
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/pointrel/
and Wikipedia being in widespread use instead of the early forms of OSCOMAK.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/index.htm
And now there is Appropedia among other projects and organizations and
discussions, many converging in this comment:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/eric-hunting-on-p2p-architecture-3-plug-in-approaches-and-the-soft-high-tech-divide/2008/08/27
But I'll admit, after twenty five or so years of wanting to do something
like OSCOMAK to support the development of space habitations, much of them
facing frustration and endless precursor hurdles and various distractions, a
project (or a programmer) can get a little stale. :-( But on the good news
side, the eight core Mac Pro with 12GB of memory and 1TB+ of disk space I am
writing this on is way beyond the capacity of a supercomputer of 25 years
ago. And that is a whole lot faster and bigger than the 1Mhz 8-bit
singe-core Commodore PET with a dual 360K floppy drive I started the
Pointrel triadal system on. :-) So a lot of things are getting easier and
more possible for individuals and small groups. :-) And it seems like there
are a lot of people here with plenty of energy and unjaded enthusiasm to
make use of all that technical potential I could only dream about or wonder
how I could raise millions of dollars to have access to. Example:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
It's been said that young programmers err in taking on too much from
ambition, but old programmers err in taking on too little from caution.
As I wrote here in 2001:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
"At this moment nearly every engineer on earth has a powerful and globally
networked computer in his or her home. Collaborative volunteer efforts are
now possible on an unprecedented scale. Moores's Law predicts continued
reductions See for example the writings of Raymond Kurzweil at
http://www.kurzweilai.net/ or Hans Moravec at http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm
in the cost of bandwidth, storage, CPU power, and displays - which will lead
to computers a million times faster, bigger or cheaper in the next few
decades. Collaboration software such as for sending email, holding real-time
video conferences, and viewing design drawings is also reducing in cost;
much of it is now effectively free. This means there are now few technical
or high-cost barriers to cooperation among engineers, many of whom even now
have in their homes (often merely for game playing reasons) computing power
and bandwidth beyond anything available to the best equipped engineers in
the 1970s."
Soon OSCOMAK will undoubtedly be way behind the times unless it moves
forward. It may well be too late for it as a community in itself for
content. As a content repository, it really is already being eclipsed by
communities like Appropedia (which are starting to think about more
metadata, as was mentioned here). As a vision of collaboration via one
system or one community, there are also probably dozens of small web
communities interested in "open manufacturing" some discussed on this group.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing
Then there are newer and more comprehensive ideas like the "social semantic
desktop". And there are Wired articles and even books related to these
general topics now. So the ideas are taking off and moving beyond OSCOMAK. A
list of some of the other related groups are on the OSCOMAK Wiki main page
(including Bryan's SKDB):
http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Main_Page
And as I wrote there: "It is expected that over time these various projects
will merge or blur into a Semantic Wikipedia or a Social Semantic Desktop."
So for me as mainly a software developer, it seems to me that is where I
should focus.
As a software developer with feelings (and a need to pay the bills based on
reputation :-), I'm disappointed I'm not technically leading that all
somehow and that I'm not not seeing my independent programming work being
used much. Let alone missing out on the knighthoods. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
But as far as the OSCOMAK project goes, it's all good news to see it
happening one way or another under any name in a distributed fashion.
Certainly that means there are more and more people to talk to about related
things. :-) And now even conferences (sorry I missed this one):
http://opensustainabilitynetwork.org/
And there are even some projects (also with conferences) that have
apparently fallen by the wayside:
http://www.thinkcycle.org (Generating a server error.)
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.thinkcycle.org/
"ThinkCycle is an academic, non-profit initiative engaged in supporting
distributed collaboration towards design challenges facing underserved
communities and the environment. ThinkCycle seeks to create a culture of
open source design innovation, with ongoing collaboration among individuals,
communities and organizations around the world."
The fate of a ThinkCycle makes me cautious about depending on a web server
solution without a strong organization behind it (and that would be a fair
criticism of OSCOMAK Wiki risks right now. :-)
And that progress on open systems is not even considering the commercial
side of things like what has long gone on with "supply chain management".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_chain_management
And then there is NIST's standardization efforts for manufacturing data.
"The Process Specification Language (PSL)"
http://www.mel.nist.gov/psl/
So a lot is going on. And probably a lot more I do not know about, like I am
learning about here.
I will next send a copy of a Buckminster Fuller Challenge entry related to
OSCOMAK that I just submitted, which also includes a bit more about my
background at the end.
--Paul Fernhout