I met with Aaron & Brewster at the Archive last week to discuss the project. It could potentially serve as a central repository for references in Wikipedia, which would a) reduce maintenance, b) allow all kinds of interesting citation tracking & data mining tools to be built. Right now it is primarily built for monographs but there's no reason it couldn't support periodicals or other kinds of sources as well.
The technology used, ThingDB, a structured wiki with a PostgreSQL backend, seems very interesting & potentially useful for other purposes. I haven't played with it yet, though; will try to get a local install up and running & see what it can do.
There are now at least 3 reasonably mature structured wiki solutions under active development (Semantic MediaWiki, OmegaWiki, & ThingDB). There's also the proprietary projects (Freebase, Google Base, etc.). Looks like there's a bright future ahead for structured data collaboration.
On 7/16/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
URL forwarded from a friend who works at the Archive:
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
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