I had the pleasure of meeting Jean Sini yesterday. He's behind a new project called blogazul, which in its current state is an integrated weblog/wiki system similar to SocialText and SnipSnap. The interesting twist is what Jean is calling a "semantic wiki," but with a different interpretation of Semantic from Platypus Wiki or discussions elsewhere. Blogazul is leveraging XML Schema instead of RDF. From blogazul.com:
"The idea is quite simple: while we maintained the “edit-in-place”
principle that makes wiki so easy to use, we added a whole new
dimension: a wiki page can now be structured in XML. And instead of
typing that XML directly, or viewing it in raw form, it is presented,
both for reading and editing, through style-sheets. The goal: you focus
on the content only, and you get the structure, the rich layout, and
the automated functionality derived from the fact that the data types
of the content are known. Just like smart tags, the semantic wiki style
sheets, based on the fact that there is an address in your page,
exposes automated features like yellow pages, driving directions, maps,
etc."
This is an interesting architecture that follows a more formal model-based approach to programming a wiki, which I talked about previously in my Big Red Button post. Definitely similar in spirit to what JotSpot, Twiki, and XWiki are doing RE: creating application platforms on a wiki base, but instead of user-friendly scripting or programming wiki objects, XML Schemas and XSLT drive the action.
1 comment:
Scott, I am hoping that the somewhat formal, model-driven approach will yield interesting results, particularly in the form of more expressiveness and power for the system to process content and trigger relevant events intelligently. The ultimate goal is to build a very "fluid" knowledge sharing infrastructure, with as little inertia as possible, that becomes more efficient at letting its users collaborate, for instance by letting them access the content within via a number of dimensions (chronology, source, category, content type, etc.) as well as alerting them of updates along as many dimensions. One of the challenges is to get to these powerful features fast enough, and in a way that doesn't sacrifice the ease of creating data types and associated actions. By the way, after spending yet another five minutes explaining that "blogazul" wasn't about weblogs, I decided it was more than time to pick a name that didn't carry that assumption: we're now "active weave" at http://www.activeweave.com - and thanks a lot for mentioning the site!
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