By the end of this year, I'm going to be confident enough with APIs and Ruby gems and all the other weirdness I have begun mastery of to start instantiating some of my infantile ideas. As such I may as well start pollinating them here.
In the meantime what I'm doing related to The Industry is the following. I'm building my own embedded alternatives to DIM, DRM, EPMA, FDQM and ODI. That sounds like a tall order but first thing's first it's all about understanding multidimensional models. It is something I understand. So I'm making baby steps in making an everything to everything translator. It would be nice, for example, to have something that could read Essbase OTL files offline, but the current Outline Extractor doesn't do that. Nevertheless, it does turn online outlines into XML, and XML ladies and gentlemen is the gateway drug.
Since I'm doing Ruby, the first persistent formats I know are YML and JSON. Funny, I thought JSON was a lot more sophisticated than it is. But it's not, it's nice and simple and all that. So while I thought several months ago that I would be interested in using JSON as some super universal data format, I can see that putting structured relational stuff in UTF-8 pipe delimited is really what I like. For persisting data structures, YML is great. I am at the vaguely dangerous level of XML - so far so so. It seems like a lot of trouble to go through, but with a bit of translational chops, I'm working it out.
So part of my current project is to build a dimension management / workflow integration tool for HFM. Fortunately, HFM spits and sucks XML for all of its metadata. Plus Star Analytics' Command Server can command HFM to spit or suck remotely. Sweet. All I have to do is write your basic operations add, delete, change, search, validate and make the thing XML literate. Then later on I'll add EPMA literacy and then maybe CSV and all that. No doubt I'll reconcile HFM dimension XML with the Essbase XML of the Olap Underground and I will be well on my way to having a general purpose dimension management system.
The purpose of the general purpose dimension management system is obvious from my career-long ambitions which is to leverage all the kinds of models I've worked with over the years. I can then enable best of breed tool selection with the infrastructure middle tier that is the thorax of all the legs of Full360's soon to be world globbing arachnid. All driven with open source software which will be the kind of serious club in the hands of the appropriate cavemen, and appropriately impenetrable for tree-wrapping IT Porsche drivers waiting to jump ship in accounting departments across the country.
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Anyway here are the two ideas that are implied in the title.
Plots.
There's this. I keep losing it. {morphology, canonical, plot, catalog} It's a catalog of all of the plots of all the fictions of all time. By the time you get to be my age and you can remember every significant commercial jingle since 1972, you start wanting to quit wasting 90 minute blocks watching drama that you've already figured out. So yeah I'm going to start reading Drieser and Proust and Mann and Goethe and all them. However, I think there's something necessary for Sci-Fi and comics. It's a vocab. I mean, how could you describe a book in ways that catalog them by complexity and plot? That's the idea. Crowdsource literary criticism by plot type, # of characters etc. That becomes the skeleton of of a very cool database.
Stars.
OPML is something that seems to be have been abandoned by the blogosphere. But there used to be a time before twitter when you could keep track of what people were keeping track of simply by subscribing to their Google Reader. Typepad uses it. So whernever I star something on Google reader, it shows up. I need to get into that so that my OPML or whatever goes where I need it to go. I'm tired of waiting for someone else to do it for me.
I have about 3 or 4 sets of subscriptions - because I read too much news, but also because I can't force the people I'm interested in following to get onto Twitter or Google+ or Blog or Facebook. So I get them pretty much the only place that aggregates all of those subscriptions - which is Flipboard, but then getting stuff from Flipboard isn't easy either.
So it's a get it together app and the end destination will be Evernote, because it really gets everything.
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