Wednesday, September 13, 2006

OpenRecord: Your next wiki?

I'd run across JavaScript browser based wiki's before (I remember a GTD one in particular), but OpenRecord is incredible.

The current wiki you know and love (for me, it is MoinMoin) is primarily suited for text with a little perhaps a little graphics (but ultimately unstructured content). If MediaWiki (used by Wikipedia) is suited for Encyclopedias, OpenRecord is meant for Almanac-style data such as the CIA World Factbook. OpenRecord targets tabular, statistical, more structured data as well as graphical views of that data (plots, graphs, etc.) that all can be created with a WYSIWYG interface.

Beyond the different use case, these folks are also addressing some of the inherent problems with wikis you bump your heads against: offline view, forking/merging, concurrent editing and much, much more.

Now this is still pre-alpha but of course there is a demo where you can create your own pages, etc. And since I haven't done this project justice, be sure to check out the screencast if you don't have religion.

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