Omnist: I Turned My Sixteen-Year-Old PhD Research Into a Personal Open Source Project in Two Weeks
Sixteen years ago, in 2010, I published a paper on formalizing schemas for tree-structured data, like XML and JSON. My goal was to move beyond guesswork: could we mathematically decide if a schema change is backward-compatible? I wanted to see if we could prove schema equivalence, or reliably infer schemas from examples. The research offered a solid theoretical framework, though it remained largely academic. For years, I hoped to build something practical from it, but the demands of a full-time job made finding the time to bridge that gap nearly impossible. ...