bricklets

The following is a polished transcript from a Business Time chat session Jason and I had earlier tonight.  Eureka!

The main entity that Bricklet helps share, search, organize and revision is the hybrid part - device document. We tried compound names for this document, like “partvice” or “depart” or “dart”, but decided to call it a bricklet instead, to maximize confusion and our egos.  So here’s our nomenclature: Bricklet = software for managing bricklets.

Think of a bricklet as a unified view of all the information and versions and sequences that could be grouped together with a part or device.  Someday, when we have well-defined and measurable functional interfaces for connecting biological devices, it may be more appropriate to enforce a stronger dichotomy between a physical part as a piece of dna and its abstract functional identity, but for now we think the grab-bag approach will be a great intermediate until we get there.

However, a little markup goes a long way, and we’re asking users to put some general annotations on the parts’ attributes and relationships.  That lets the software help keep things organized and helps a user search for parts in a way that’s stronger than a fulltext search over wildly heterogeneous documents.