TomPhelps - Raymond Yee's Wiki

Tom Phelps is the author of the MultivalentBrowser.

Hire him!

Over the last couple of years in this blog, I've mentioned the Multivalent Browser and its primary creator and friend, Tom Phelps. Tom is currently looking for work. If we had the money at the Interactive University, I would want to hire him. Since we don't at this point, I'm writing this note to argue why one of my readers might want to.

At some future date, I will want to go into greater detail what the Multivalent Browser is and why I'm so excited about it. For now, let me sketch some ideas and offer some observations. The Multivalent Browser is a "platform for new ideas", a good cut of what web browsers should be able to do -- but can't. It's the most promising technology I've seen for letting readers of documents deal with multiple and disparate document types in a unifed way. It is the closest thing to the Universal Canvas that I know of (though I have yet to plumb the depths of Microsoft Office 2003)

As we develop the Scholar's Box, I've long thought about integrating the Multivalent Browser into the Scholar's Box. We are designing the Scholar's Box to let end-users gather, create, and share documents -- ideally, from any digital source, of any data type, and in conjunction with any service. To that end, we need to find a comprehsive, rich document formalism to enable the parsing and interpretation of documents in a unified way. Currently, the Scholar's Box can access six sources of materials. That type of access has been forged through the hand-crafting of individual connectors that have yet to be generalized to handle the huge variety of document types that users will want to integrate should the Scholar's Box prove practically useful. The Multivalent Browser promises to be that rich unifying document formalism that enable users of the Scholar's Box to work with disparate documents. (I still need to work out exactly how the Scholar's Box and the Mulivalent Browser would integrate -- but that's some of work that I hope that Tom will be able to do in the future.)

From an inspection of the Multivalent Browser, I conclude that Tom is a superb programmer. (Yes, the Browser is not quite ready for prime time -- but remember that it is almost exclusively the programmer effort of one man.) I've been terribly impressed with his vision, enthusiasm, determination, and craftsmanship. He's also a great person to throw ideas around with.

The Multivalent Browser is important but underappreciated work. I hope that there will be some way for the digital library/academic computer community to enable the work to continue -- lest we soon lose Tom to some other sector.