Sinu

Yesterday I read about Twine at Read/Write/Web and was giddy with excitement.  For so long I have been waiting for a semantic based wiki solution that we can use to organize, mash and store all the data/knowledge we gather from our subscribers, into a beautiful set of regular reports and real-time dashboards that would help our subscriber companies explore their own companies from an IT perspective - as deeply as they would like.

We are currently accomplishing this using Jotspot.  We were a very early adopter of Jotspot and saw great potential - but with limited semantic like tools within JotSpot, we ended up with little ability to report from the data we were putting in.  We have been regularly making our sacrifices for the JotSpot/Google gods and have not lost faith - but our eye has started to wander.

When I first saw Freebase, I thought it was the answer to our data organizing needs.  How easy to use, how elegant it was...  But the more I learned about Freebase, the more it seemed that they were out to start a war with Wikipedia for the source of all knowledge.  Wikipedia's fanatical community has kept it difficult to use and this may give Freebase a chance, time will tell.  But one thing seems clear - Metaweb has no time to build business tools while chasing this lofty goal.   So I was left to continue with my sacrifices and prayers to GoogleJot to relaunch JotSpot as the ultimate semantic tool.

I read about Twine and read the Wired article about them and once again my hopes are lifted.  Whether this is the answer to our prayers is yet to be seen.  While there are hints that they want to build a business friendly tool (privacy, AD integration, etc) - we'll see how they unravel.

All this metathinking has me wondering what the UI options for our mythical knowledge tool might be.

I wonder if we start with an object and set the type as 'Sinu Subscriber Business Solution' and then add 'hosted in-house' as an additional type/tag - will the UI automatically add a new column option when displaying this object that would summarize the backup health for the object based on data we are collecting from the backup solution in place.   This would be a beautiful thing.

In the meantime,  I am very happy the wiki is evolving.  If you want to understand what it is that is getting all of is Semantic Web groupies excited - watch Tim Berners-Lee explain it.