King Chung Huang and Mike Mattson are presenting at the NMC online conference on Wednesday. The presentation just went live, and it's an excellent overview of some of the thinking behind APOLLO (the next version of the CAREO software).
A brief description of the fundamental conceptual shifts we've made, including "Object At Center", is provided, and King even touches a bit on some of the technical details (with cool sounding object class names, too).
APOLLO really is shaping up to be some amazingly cool stuff, and this is just the first (of many) public appearances.
There are a lot of subtle inferences made during the presentation, some of which can only really be clarified with demonstrations (which will be rolled out in the next few weeks and months).
The concept of "Nodes" is pretty powerful stuff. We're not talking about simple lists of metadata anymore, but quasi-intelligent objects/containers that can interact with other objects/containers to produce more elaborate/complex results. At a very simple level, this could be analogous to W3C DOM Nodes, which can be single objects or complex hierarchies, with a single simple interface to access and manipulate the contents.
The other cool thing that Nodes can provide (based on a defined interface to control/manipulate/access the contents) is the ability to create rich interfaces to add/edit/view/refine Nodes (and subnodes, and sub-sub-nodes, ad infinitum). Sounds kinda boring, but it boils down to providing a way to create cool, dynamic presentations of Nodes, or transporting them to other media (Node-to-DVD? Node-to-website? Node-to-LMS?), and lots of other stuff that we haven't even thought of yet...