Norman
I am working as a it architect in a financial service company.
Since almost 15 years i am fascinated by wikis, open source and innovation in technology. As Ward Cunningham praised wagn as progress in wiki concepts, i'm quite curious to try. I established wikis in several companies, and plan to employ wagn for "enterprise architecture manament".
Some Questions :
- Will it work to install "wagn" with in a jruby, rail3 (with hibernate orm) maybe on tomcat maybe integrated with xwiki (which i introduced in our company) ?
- whats the conceptual relation to the ongoing efforts in semantic wikis/web ?
- Suppose you have some database you would like to intergrate (publish, annotate) these data with ruby/rails/wagn. Whats a simple appraoch to do that ?
- Might it work out to install wagn on jruby/rails on google apps plattform and integrate googles bigtable and/or google wiki engine by APIs ?
Lots of questions and experiments. Lets see how far i get & whats the amount of time it will consume.
+wiki
Hi Norman, welcome to Wagn!
I'll leave the install questions for others, since i don't geek at that level much. :-)
The conceptual relation to semantic wiki/web is, broadly, that Wagn takes a folksonomic approach to it. That is, Wagn makes it easier than most systems to adjust any formal codification over time, rather than relying on big design up front. In fact you can start with cards of a certain category having little or even no structure, and over time as it emerges from the community of people using it, it can be codified with structure, pointers and compound names, and continue to be tweaked after that. We don't yet export in RDF-related formats, but some work has been done on XML views of Wagn cards, and we make some effort to keep presentation separate from content.
Regarding database publishing/annotation, i'm not sure if i understand your question; an example would help. Web-accessible external data stores can be routed through Wagn's HTML cards, which can use nesting (aka transclusions) to access different data depending on context. For example, we built one Wagn which had many cards for counties and cities, and with a very small amount of Wagneering we were able to automatically display the appropriate maps, charts, and statistical information from another website in an iframe, with something like src="http:///Norman". The double-braces are our syntax for inclusion, and the _left refers to the left part of the card you're in the context of. So we Wagneered once, and reused on all of the city and county cards.
--John Abbe (also a very long time wiki fan :-)
Hi Norman,
We haven't tested on jruby but I don't see any reason it wouldn't work. Rails3 though is a lot different than than the 2.3.x series and we're likely a ways off from doing that conversion. If Rails3 is needed for the hibernate ORM that might be sticky.
--Lewis Hoffman.....Mon May 31 09:09:55 -0700 2010