The Espian Rosetta

Being an outline of The Plexnet Heptarchy.

Roughly speaking, The Plexnet is an Operating System that makes heavy use of
the internet. Designed by Tav Ino, it unifies and improves various protocols,
applications, and systems that currently exist separately such as HTTP, P2P,
browsers, and so on.

For ease of explanation of how it works, The Plexnet may be broken down into
seven main layers: Entities, Events, Storage, Services, Interface, Identity,
and Networking, each of which are to be documented here.

@ Plexnet Entities

Entities are cryptographically-secure private databases that store information
created by a single agent, individual, or organisation &c. Their backend is
basically just a queryable set (the Entity itself) of hashtables (called
Units). The information stored is metadata, so for example Entities should not
be used to store binary data.

Units only store property/value mappings. They may be made more useful with
Schemas, which are like rules or contracts that affirm some condition, such as
"this Unit should have an 'age' property; if it doesn't, consider the 'age'
property value to be 0". A Unit that has one or more associated Schemas is
called an Object.

Entities may be queried to return the set of all Units that contain a specific
property and value pair, for example all the Units containing {age: 18}. These
resulting sets are called Indexes.

@ Plexnet Events

Any dynamism in the system, anything that changes such as a Unit being modified
or so on, will have an associated sensor. If that sensor is on, it'll trigger
an Event with any registered listener. As with Units, the Sensors may have
conditions on them.

@ Plexnet Storage

There are four verbs in the Plexnet Storage mechanism: GET, PUT, EXISTS, INFO,
and DELETE. These accord to the HTTP verbs, except for EXISTS which is like a
simple status request, and INFO, which is like HTTP's HEAD. These verbs work on
identifiers, which are combined (md5, sha1, sha256, tiger, whirlpool) digests
of the content.

The storage system is backend agnostic: it can be implemented over anything
from the filesystem to a distributed hash table.

@ Plexnet Services

Plexnet Services are essentially simple remote procedure calls, allowing you to
access functions on other systems. For example, there may be services to
convert between currencies. The services will use the unix philosophy of being
small modular units which emit straightforward easily parsable typed output,
which can then be linked up to make larger services.

Calls to these services will be embeddable inside documents and so forth, to
facilitate the inclusion of live data.

@ Plexnet Interface

@ Plexnet Identity

@ Plexnet Networking

@ Summary: The Plexnet

[@@ It's the way the layers interact that makes the Plexnet.]

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/