Xanadu Project

A project by Ted Nelson to create a hyperlinked information space, that would allow for the bi-directional verification of links, attribution of ownership of content, and automated royalty collection and payment to content authors. Once a commercial project of Autodesk, the project was dropped by Autodesk, and is again being pursued independently by Mr. Nelson. See also Xanadu and http://www.xanadu.net/

The basic idea is to make all mutable elements addressable (up to individual words in node contents) and use transclusion as the hyperlinking mechanism.

Another element was cost. All elements were supposed to have an author, and transclusions (the use of material) would cost a small amount of money. I wonder if this is feasible.

The project was open-sourced in August: see http://udanax.com/