So the analogy here will be fleshed out later, but here's a tidbit about why I've come to think of the various projects I'm working on as all falling under an umbrella project called "Amiatinus"

The name comes from a medieval manuscript, the Codex Amiatinus. It's great claim to fame is (among other things) the fact that it is the oldest existing manuscript of the Bible with all the books between two covers. That made it fairly useless in practical terms. But it must have been a magnificent and awe-inspiring thing to look at. Indeed, it still is to this day.

That makes it a monument of the age of manuscripts, and in naming my projects after it I'm drawing inspiration and vision from that. There's also something a little sneakier at work. It's the phrase, "between two covers" that draws my attention. That phrase became a meaningful metaphor in the age of print, signifying a complete encapsulation of knowledge. Clearly enough, that metaphor no longer holds in the age of digital texts -- the age of the web of documents, and the nascent age of the web of data. Instead, the revision of the metaphor should be something like "all the info you need in one interface." And, as I've heard Eric Miller say a few times, not just one interface -- drop the data into whatever interface is best for the task at hand.

And so the driving force behind what I'm working on lately is first collecting up data in RDF so that it can be dropped into a variety of interfaces. And I'm working on rough sketches of interfaces. Check the links in the UMWBlogs Directory project and the University Ontology project to see a hint of the directions that these ideas are going.