Jess's Lab Notebook

Embark: Dynamic Documents for Making Plans

Here's a video of the Embark talk from ACM SPLASH 2023 in Portugal

Embark makes the argument that applications consist of Data, Computation, and Views, and that these three concepts are bundled together in most applications. They take a standard outliner (think LogSeq, Rome, orgmode, etc) and augment that with three affordances corresponding to those concepts:

  • Mentions: Structured data like places or dates are represented as mentions inside the outline text, inserted via an autocomplete menu. Mentions are actually just links to other outline nodes containing structured data.
  • Formulas: Computations like routing can be performed within the outline using formulas written in a simple spreadsheet-like language. They take structured data from the surrounding outline as input, and return new structured data nodes.
  • Views: Any node or subtree of the outline can be visualized in a rich view like a map, shown either inline within the document or separately.
Embark-Dynamic Documents for Making Plans
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Embark: Dynamic Documents for Making Plans