From the webpage:
Camlistore is:
- a way to store, sync, share, model and back up content
- a work in progress
- Open Source (Apache licensed)
- an acronym for “Content-Addressable Multi-Layer Indexed Storage”, hinting that Camlistore is about:
- content-addressable storage
- separate interoperable parts (storage, sync, sharing, modeling), with well-defined protocols and roles
- your “home directory for the web”
….
If I am reading the website correctly, the project hopes to deploy a “write-only” solution.
Any estimation of data storage capacity, even in the short-term is going to sound lame when the short-term arrives. I don’t monitor the storage literature closely but even I have heard of 3-D storage and crystalline storage projects. A “write-only” future may not be that far off.
Whether it arrives or not, my concern is what role topic maps can play in systems where storage is always increasing?
One role for which topic maps seems very well suited is to host the mappings between formats, even archival formats, in which data is stored. In the twenty or so years since digital preservation has become a topic among curators and museums, there have been more metadata and storage format proposals than I an easily remember. And data has been stored in all of them, some in multiple versions of the same proposals. I don’t know of any reason to expect the turnover in storage metadata and/or formats to slow in the future.
Topic maps can store a two-way migration between metadata and storage formats so that users of older or newer software/formats are not disadvantaged with regard to stored data. That will require active maintenance of the mapping topic maps but that will be the case with any robust solution.