Forester
Forester is a tool for creating densely interlinked networks (forests) of scientific writing in hypertext... Forester is a tool for authoring, exploring, and sharing scientific and mathematical hypertexts. It is your lab notebook, your journal, your blackboard, and the home of your lecture notes.... Many working scientists, students, and hobbyists have wished to create their own tag-based hypertext knowledge base, but the combination of tools historically required to make this happen are extremely daunting. Both the Stacks project and Kerodon use a cluster of software called Gerby, but bitrot has set in and it is no longer possible to build its dependencies on a modern environment without significant difficulty, raising questions of longevity. Moreover, Gerby’s deployment involves running a database on a server (in spite of the fact that almost the entire functionality is static HTML), an architecture that is incompatible with the constraints of the everyday working scientist or student who knows at most how to upload static files to their university-provided public storage. The recent experience of the nLab’s pandemic-era hiatus and near death experience has demonstrated with some urgency the precarity faced by any project relying heavily on volunteer system administrators. https://www.forester-notes.org/
built by Jon Sterling: https://www.jonmsterling.com/
The output of Forester is just a folder of XML fles with an XSLT stylesheet. (In the future, we might emit HTML or similar directly.)
The future of Forester.
Federating multiple forests. Crucial for institutional use, in which private lab notebooks are bidirectionally linked with group notebooks. A step towards a new and more deliberate World Wide Web?
Real-time collaborative editing and version control. Let’s learn from Ink and Switch’s deep work in this area
code repo https://sr.ht/~jonsterling/forester/
Forester combines associative and hierarchical networks of evergreen notes (called “trees”) into hypertext sites called “forests”.
Forester is written in the OCaml programming language, and makes use of the latest features of OCaml 5.
A tree in Forester is usually associated to an address of the form xxx-NNNN where xxx is your chosen “namespace” (most likely your initials) and NNNN is a four-digit base-36 number. The purpose of the namespace and the base-36 code is to uniquely identify a tree, not only within your forest but across all forests. A tree with address xxx-NNNN is stored in a file named xxx-NNNN.tree (unless it is emitted from inside another tree by means of the inline subtrees feature).
Forester renders your forest to some XML files in the output/ directory; XML is, like HTML, a format for structured documents that can be displayed by web browsers. The forest template comes equipped with a built-in XSLT stylesheet (theme/default.xsl) which is used to instruct web browsers how to render your forest into a pleasing and readable format.
Nov'2024 slides
Dec'2022: Designing tools for scientific thought (tools for thought)
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