Started: June 29, 2013
Last Edit: May 27 2015

Some time ago I watched a webcast by Dan Gordon about the 'library everywhere'.
The basic idea was that researchers need wide 'ubiquirous' real time access
to many libraries/archives to work effectively.  I believe this is only a
small part of the story as (in my opinion) librarise are only a small part 
of current available sources of information and there are many others on the
horizon.

In this note I make the following proposal. Let's build a stable internet
accessable 'model of history'.

What is a 'model of history'?

It is a repository of historical information in a computer (and human)
accessible form. It should contain the 'facts' of history. For example, a
information about US presidents. Really the world only needs one list of 
presidents and their properties (not one for every American history textbook
ever written). This data repository will distinguish between 'immortal' and
'ephermeral' information. The fact the 'George Wasington' was the first
president of the 'United States' is true now and forever - thus 'immortal'.
The fact that 'George Washington' was a good president might be questionable
 - so it is ephemeral, ie, a statement of opinion by someone at a particular
time. It can be 'made' immortal by adding more info, eg '"John Reporter'
wrote on Sept 1, 1952 in the NYT page 12 that "George Washington was a good
president." is immortal. ie enough citation always makes epherimal data
immortal. A goal of our 'model of history' should be to concentrate on
immortal data.


What should be in the model?
----------------------------

people
places
events
...


How might we describe these?
----------------------------

Use IBML and a madeler with an 'event engine'. 


What is an event engine?
------------------------

An event engine is a tool for turning a 'static' description of a
(possible) events into a running simulation of those events. eg IBUKI Event
manager.

Can events be asyncronous and happen simultaneously - yes.

This 'database' should be accessible as a web service. It could be organized
and distributed like the 'semantic web' but RDF triples are (in my opinion)
not useful for this task (see [RDF-OUT]).  The important point is that it is
technologically possible to have ONE (possibly mirrored for safty and/or
efficiency - not semantics) copy of the data.  This copy could be crowd
sourced but  should likely also be crowd curated (sort of like wikopedia).

IBUKI has begun building such a service called 'The-History-Vault'.

Corrently we are looking at two areas of histort

  American History
  Stuart Endland

This kind of modeling system is not limited to history.  Any area of interest
from literature (eg Milton) to sports (San Francisco Giants) might be modeled.

Access to these models represent a new genra of web site and open the
possibility of a new kind of collaborative publication that, if it gained 
academic respectability, might be considere on a par with the usual kind
of academic publication.