mostly the ability to take differing content types and connect them to assemble articles/ books or formatted data structures and user friendly information sources. this means projects themsleves are compositions of objects and events, as are books.

this is achievable via a number of ways, but with nowehre near the modularity I would like, with my ideal model being the modular synthesis environments provided by a myriad of audio composition software. (note this is starting to be achieved via software such as Yahoo's Pipes nad the Lily scripting GUI).

nonetheless, as I have started with Drupal I am limited for now to the interface and technologies that Drupal provides. So the following modules seem to offer what I am after:

OP:
on the operation side is the basic operation for making associations between content. to handle this I can use Node Relativity module, freelinking and wikitoools. This approach has some problems. Node relativity is great because it is storing two way relationships somewhere in a table that can be accessed and displayed for quick and easy list creation. hence I can peruse all object associated with a given project, for example. freelinking is great for creating inline references within the text of a page to other pages to allow for fast content association across hierarchies. In one way, freelinking should allow for the rapid creation of an index module such that all freelinked terms are terms important enough to have some distinct explanation, as opposed to just a casual mention. however, wikilink module does not keep track of where in-context mentions are made - it only provides a list of links to the location of each node which has the title or explanation of the term. finally, biblio module provides a footnoted citation feature however this would seem to be a bit useless for now as it does not accumulate across pages, hence when pages are combined the footnotes are not collated. perhaps this can be achieved and would seem to be a major goal in using these modules. using all of the modules together it would seem that I can quickly create data structures governing the creation of projects, books, articles. it would be nice to use drupal as a manager for the creation of various patches in a single environment but i don't see that this is what it is intended for. with so many patch based software environments available it would be nice if there were some sort of meta patcher type software that handled patched at the abstract level (perhaps via XML) with object templates for different environments, such that a single piece of software could be used to create patches in a uniform way that could be then exported in the required format and imported into the software. this would certainly introduce some sort of standardisation inro the are of patch based composition environments.