Id: An Identification Database - Existing databases and search engines are poorly adapted to one of the most common problems people turn to them for, namely identifying the best resource to use.
Guild Sites - Guild Sites are self-generative sites related to a particular area of interest. Members visit the site regularly to help further develop knowledge bases related to their own areas of interest. The site is supported by constructive relationships with businesses that wish to market to the members.
Idea Forum - An on-line community for Open Inventors. This is the logical extension of this site to a community site.
Living Books - Paper books are snapshots in time of a particular view point. We need to find general mechanisms for keeping such information alive and evolving. Mailing lists or newsgroups is a good forum for discussion changes to texts, but what the mechanisms by which particular changes are adopted as official? Conceptually this would be the equivalent of open source for books.
Sponsored Creation - With the growing failure of copyrights and patents, a mechanism is needed to support content creators. Copyrights make money by restricting the access to an existing work. No value is created in this process. A better model is to find ways to encourage people to sponsor works in progress and have the creators freely give the result away. The amount of sponsorship would depend on the reputation of the content creators based on previous works. The sponsors would both get the end product and their contribution to the work would be acknowledged through a credits list.
Taxy: A Taxonomic Database - Taxy is an identification database designed to handle biological species. It does identification based on the concept of synoptic keys and provides a mechanism for automatically deciding which features are likely to help most at each stage of the identification. A text-based prototype is available.
Name: The Name Management Engine - Name is a program designed to manage the complexities of correctly naming biological species following the rules for botanical nomenclature. The current implementation has an easy to use, graphical interface but only works on PowerPC based Macintoshes.
Last Modified: April 21, 2000