turning the world upside down

Wiki's are interesting in that, for a wide range of content there is a fixed UI. One reason why software is so expensive is that we must expend so much effort on UIs.

AgileWiki(3) is intended as a platform for a wide range range of applications. It is highly extensible, but only on the back end. This is possible as it is based on Rolonics, which is a complete and comprehensive theory of knowledge and consequently fully applicable for most applications dealing with information.

Rolonics describes a rich but fixed set of ways to create and aggrigate structures, allowing for the creation of a specialized database optimized for the knowledge structures it uses. But even more interesting is the display of those structures, as this can be done with a fixed vocabulary (i.e. a single XML schema or DTD), which allows for a stable UI and makes the implementation of multiple clients (swing, web, etc.) a reasonable task.

I've been reworking the displays of AgileWiki3 to be event based, with an XML document passed from the server to the client for describing the display content. At first there were new events needed for everything encountered, but as the work has progressed, I've realized that the total number of events (read XML element types) is a fixed and relativly small number.

Methinks this is going to be disruptive technology of the first order.

Bill