A “DataBall” is a mess of mixed media data collected by a community. We first coined “DataBall” to talk about the product of treating WikiAsCollage.
A DataBall would include things such as:
- browsing data (who was browsing where, when?)
- IRC logs
- SocialBookmarking
- wiki pages
- tags (see UsingTags)
- web annotations
- structured, semi-structured, and un-structured data
The data ball would be organized by the community tending it.
It would be wiki-like, but probably not wiki.
There would be multiple ways of putting data into the ball (see ContentRouting,) and data would come out of the DataBall in many ways (see WebAnnotation, PhraseAnnotation?.)
Questions
- What kinds of wiki-like databases are out there?
See Also
tags social bookmarking metadata data ball page databall
Discussion
Wiki-Like Databases
To expand on my question:
Is anyone here aware of good or great wiki-like databases?
Something that:
- You access via the web.
- The general public can edit. (Or, may require “joining.”)
- It’s semi-structured: You can add new fields, and the like.
- It’s OpenSource, or FreeSoftware.
- It publishes the data in various forms- CSV, spreadsheet, perhaps MySQL? load file, etc.,.
- People not only can edit the content, but edit the structure of the database.
- Structure is revertable- you can go back to a prior structure, perhaps, or something like that.
- Different types of fields, such as numbers, strings, and so on, but perhaps drop-down lists, and pointers to other fields, and so on.
- The entry forms are editable. You can say: “Here’s a sheet people can use to enter data, and query the database.” You could have different entry forms, for different purposes.
Anyone aware of something like this, or approaching this, and so on?
I know that XWiki has this sort of setup, XWiki:WhyIsXWikiDifferent, is anyone aware of anything else?
I’m developing CoForum slowly into this direction.