MetaWiki

Here's the promised follow-up to my ERRoLs post.

Jeff Young has been gradually generalizing his ideas on what can be done with web protocols like OAI-PMH and SRU.  One thing that has been missing in all of this is an editing capability.  Jeff realized that by adding an edit capability he had all the pieces needed to make a wiki.  Actually, more than that.  All the pieces to make a wiki with fielded data.

Now, Ralph LeVan has been thinking for some time about how repositories might be layered on top of source-code control systems to provide versioning, so he persuaded a version of his SRW/U code to accept updates and layered it on top of a simple file-based repository.  Add in a few XSLT style sheets, and you get MetaWiki.  A MetaWiki looks like a wiki on the surface, but it has the capability of accommodating arbitrary XML schemas.  That gives you fielded data for keeping track of things such as metadata (hence the name MetaWiki).

The wiki paradigm gives an understandable way to interact with the system, but the system underneath continues to evolve.  We've know for some time that the ERRoL syntax has limitations and that OpenURL would be a more general way of expressing operations.  Jeff has now written a general OpenURL processor (the existing open source versions seem too oriented to just solving the appropriate copy problem; OpenURL has been recast in much more general terms in the 1.0 version), and he busy rewriting much of the MetaWiki plumbing to use it.

--Th

Comments

[SJ]

Regarding XML, XSLT, structured data and wikis: you might be interested in the related work being done by some MediaWiki programmers working on a WikiData project, using a multilingual dictionary as their test case:

Wikidata ideas, and Milestones for a first implementation.

Other related projects include: Kendra Base, and the Java-based XWiki.