Sheldon-
Here's a very cool wiki tool that adds structure
to unstructured Wiki
pages. It would be interesting to see if this approach could be
integrated with the category system now implemented on MediaWiki.
See my Wikidata proposal:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata
Thanks to the ongoing schema work by Brion and others, it will be
reasonably straight-forward to treat every wiki page as a set of wikidata
name/value/type triples, and to define the allowed/required triples,
relations and input form layout on a per-namespace basis.
Stuff I didn't see in the Jot demo:
- data relations (so that the available selections in one form come from
the content of another table, for example)
- element or page histories and diffs
- recent changes of forms
- details on the form syntax, which looked rather convoluted (but they
want to do a visual form designer)
- namespaces were mentioned, not sure about the implementation
- internationalization; I doubt they have put much effort into it, for us
it is crucial: Which parts of a form can be internationalized, which parts
*must* be internationalized, and which ones never have to be?
What else is there in Jot?
Scripting: They have some simple XML-based application development
language. I think the template syntax will develop into that direction.
Interfaces with proprietary databases: not of immediate usefulness to us.
Attachments: I dislike the concept of attachments in wikis, but
simplifying link-collections to external files may be desirable. They also
have auto-indexing, probably including Word files and the like - important
in a business context, not so important for us.
E-mail to wiki gateway: Is part of the advanced LiquidThreads gateway
ideas. Only really makes sense for discussions, in my opinion.
WYSIWYG: Easy to do if you break wikitext editability, hard to do if you
want to maintain both. Not sure if they have tried to solve the hard
problem - if so, maybe something worth looking into. Otherwise not.
Anything else? I've applied for a beta just in case. Can someone do a
patent search on this stuff?
Regards,
Erik