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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.

 

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  • twiki the first wiki i've installd in a company. It worked well in that company but i disliked perl-cgi programming and missing reldb. Making secury work was a drag. This was 12 years ago. Now twiki seems to grow into direction of a quick-app-framework-based-on-wiki. Last try 2 years ago it was quite dificult to get it running on my windows laptop.
  • plone with zwiki was the next try to adopt a wiki in a company. Deploying plone youn need in fact no additional wiki-functionality, these function a more than coverd by plones functionality. A relational db was missing again the strange kind of object-db zope was underlying th system. But security and adminitration was simple and productive using the zope-admin-dialog.
  • tikiwiki Next try. This time a reldb is used. Download / install and out of the box you can start workin, admin & security was simple powerfull and well-documented.
  • Now wagn looks like a blend of the best. It seems simple to approach, but with clean yet powerfull structuring mechanisms. The installation on my laptop is still not working, it seems security is difficult to understand & setup, and worst it steps into your way hindering to start working. Let's if it can besolved. i keep on trying.

 

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Personas  "play with roles; test your proxymity-distance endurance"

 

idea : A group of people challanged with fear or panic-disorder or similar traumatic experiences. They start carefull first steps into personal relationships. They might seek similar people sharing experience and intressts. They would like to meet in virtual distance without exposing to much. They experiment with their impression in relation to other people. Maybe if trust emerges real-life interface is possible.

 

solution = personas They meet at a portal taking special care of privacy. When logged in the first thing to do is choosing the _persona_ they want to represent right now (The actual chosen persona is always displayed during session). A persona consists of a name and certain attributs (for instance address data, intressts, stories, preferences, tastes ...).

When exchanging information (on the portal, in a group or persona2persona) the user can always chose which attributs of his persona he wants to expose (an exposing-log is collected to each persona). Each contribution is marked with the persona (a list of contributions The user can create a new persona any time. He  can reuse attributes from his personas and choose new attributes(-values) for his new persona. An important attribute of a persona might be story "What's the characteristic/motivation of the persona"

 

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implementation (prototype)

  • a persona card type should be plused with portalid (the portal-account = the wagn-account) plus the name of the persona (apearing on any contribution)  the attributes empty attributes for story, address, intresst should appear in a new created persona. Further common attributes (with a short content-characterising-sentence) should be offered for choice. And completele new attributs can be defined
  • a contribution card type collect their creation an changes associated to "personas not wagn-users". So the persona, offers free choice of an contribution-role.
  • In order to step into the portal, some text explaining the idea, howto-use-it, examples, tutorial should be offered to new users. Of course autopoiesis should start by allowing the users to contribute to explanation-of-persona-portal and first-steps and user-stories.
  • second milestone : groups a communication area where people meet for exchange. The group might be open-to-join associated to a certain theme or moderated by a pesona by invitation-only or open-to-grow by consensus-invitation.

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open questions

  • (persona-switch) whats the mechanism to choose & change the persona the user wants to represent during session ?
  • (contribute-persona-log) How to manipulate a cardtype so that the actual persona is logged with changes & the wagn-user is NOT logged (for privacy-reasons) (i assume somewhere in cardtype > options >settings)
  • (persona-state) How to change wagn-layout so instead of upper-right-appearance "my Card : wagn-user" there should be "my persona: actual-chosen-persona" & have it changed after a (persona-switch). solution contextual names might be the sollution something like might display the actual chosen persona.
  • (persona-attribut-choice) Maybe Pointers are to be used to offer a choice of common attributes to poulate the persona.

 

 

+wiki

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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

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