Friday, March 23, 2012

Media Profile spines: redundant?

Shortly into today's long walk, I realised that  the Active Affiliation implies Identity epiphany I discussed yesterday has had another implication. The Identity object, in being an aggregation of devices and roles, does not belong to any device in particular: it is, like the Account, Account Profile, and the Affiliation, an abstract Element needed only by Clique Space(TM) to manage an individual's particular identity as they may wish to express it through these Elements, Connections and Media Profiles.

I spent the remainder of today's walk debating the merits of customising the remaining Media Profile, Connection and Participant for different media, and I can't find one. I questioned myself as to why it ever occurred to me that customising Media Profiles, Connections, Active Affiliations and Participants was a good idea, and this may have been because there was a point in time where I had to deal with the fact that the administrator Client Device needed to implement these Elements in peculiar ways so I could do things like being able to reconstruct an Element from multiple projections.

Additionally, I have been trying to work out the form of the Agent Device's media Elements, and how the mechanics of the Agent Device implementation realises its media as just a small subset of media which could be modelled by Clique Space. The Agent Device needs to provide an adequate answer to this question of self-reference if Clique Space's ultimate value is to be realised. I believe considerations about the intersection between the model and the implementation were carried perhaps a little too far; apart from the server side code allowing device state to be siphoned to an Agent Device, or Enabling Constraints necessary to represent and convey this state, or perhaps code necessary to render a collaboration in a specific medium to a specific display context, the core Clique Space application model must provide everything necessary for other media unrelated to the Agent or administrator Client Device to be modelled in a Clique Space.

Client and server side code still has to be developed for regular devices and Agent Devices respectively, but I believe that discounting of the notion of the Media Profile spine and keeping the core data model abstract will be an acute simplification of the proof-of-concept. That'll make happy by a degree of acuity equal to this simplification.

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