Categories
World Wide Web

Programmable wikis, Application wikis, Situational applications

Heard of Jot? It has been in the news for some time now, calling itself the first true application wiki.

So what's this thing all about and how is it different from normal wikis?

Before we delve into this, we need to know where normal wikis fail and how this new concept of application wikis helps in solving them.

Wikis in their present form contain highly unstructured data. Take the example of Wikipedia. Wikipedia allows users to create pages containing information about just anything in the world.

The information in the wikis would be more useful if it can be used somewhere else. For example, I would want to just double click on a word in my browser and view the definition of it (and not the entire page). Or I might want to relate content in a page with that of another – semantically. I might also want to view content based on my current expertise level (contextual views).

In order for this to happen, we require that wikis be more intelligent. Enter application wikis.

Application wikis bring in the dynamic content aggregation feature that is lacking in current wikis. This means that the data may not even reside in one place. It might be aggregated at runtime. However this is not it. The content might be pushed out as an RSS and people can subscribe to changes made to specific sections of the wiki or maybe mailed to them. The basic idea is to be able to 'program' the wiki to display 'information' dynamically.

This brings in some interesting applications of application wikis. Application wikis can be used, for example to create a page for a conference. This page would contain 'A google map' plugin, which would show the venue on the map, latest news in the form of an RSS feed, the weather information in another portlet, a list of all participants, which might be coming from a database directly, a list of all talks (which might be maintained in a separate database for some reason).

You might note that the data does not actually exist in the wiki at all. The wiki just acts like an aggregator of content.

Now comes the concept of views. As a participant in the conference, I might be given more information about the talks, while a non-participant may get lesser information. A speaker might get a totally different set of information and so for the organizers.

You probably don't even need a Graphical UI to view the data. You might as well have a kind of Query Interface that allows you to view data based on your role and your preferences.

It might be obvious, but let me clarify that the content for a particular page may come from a specific section of some other page. So I could have, say a page on Bangalore, a page on Mysore and a page on Cities in Karnataka, which fetches content from these pages. The moment the content changes in the original pages, the content viewed from the aggregated page also changes.

Yeah, there's nothing special here, it's the traditional MVC pattern applied to Wikis. It had to come some day.

Two initiatives that I know in this field are from Jot and Semantic MediaWiki.

If you are a Web 2.0 or a Semantic web geek, you might have come across this by now, but if you have not, then you got to check this out.