Restructuring the Web with Git by Simon St. Laurent.
From the post:
Web designers? Git? Github? Aren’t those for programmers? At Artifact, Christopher Schmitt showed designers how much their peers are already doing with Github, and what more they can do. Github (and the underlying Git toolset) changes the way that all kinds of people work together.
Sharing with Git
As amazing as Linux may be, I keep thinking that Git may prove to be Linux Torvalds’ most important contribution to computing. Most people think of it, if they think of it at all, as a tool for managing source code. It can do far more, though, providing a drastically different (and I think better) set of tools for managing distributed projects, especially those that use text.
Git tackles an unwieldy problem, managing the loosely structured documents that humans produce. Text files are incredibly flexible, letting us store everything from random notes to code of all kinds to tightly structured data. As awesome as text files are—readable, searchable, relatively easy to process—they tend to become a mess when there’s a big pile of them.
Simon makes a good argument for the version control and sharing aspects of Github.
But Github doesn’t offer any features (that I am aware of) to manage the semantics of the data stored at Github.
For example, if I search for “greek,” I am returned results that include the Greek language, Greek mythology, New Testament Greek, etc.
There are only four hundred and sixty-five (465) results as of today but even if I look at all of them, I have no reason to think I have found all the relevant resources.
For example, a search on Greek Mythology would miss:
Myths-and-myth-makers–Old-Tales-and-Superstitions-Interpreted-by-Comparative-Mythology_1061, which has one hundred and four (104) references to Greek gods/mythology.
Moreover, now having discovered this work should be returned on a search for Greek Mythology, how do I impart that knowledge to the system so that future users will find that work?
Github works quite well, but it has a ways to go before it improves on the finding of documents.