Let there be Juju
So I've taken the first big step in giving form to, what up until now I was calling "my open source project" or "project one". I registered and submitted my project description to SourceForge under the GPL. With apologies to readers who were bored the first time I described my project, I now post my project application here in the hopes a more terse and hopefully readable description might serve as a beacon to anyone in the blogosphere who finds this through a Technorati watchlist or whatever. So without further ado, I give you the juju.sourceforge.net application:
Project Information
-------------------
1. Submitter: brendanavery
2. Project UNIX Name: juju
3. Project Descriptive Name: Juju
4. License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
License other:
5. Project Description: Juju is a personal/collaborative knowledge management engine combining principles of Wiki and the Semantic Web. The initial version is produced in Java with support for most common relational database engines (initial testing performed with MySQL.)
6. Registration Description:
I created Juju initially as a personal information manager, out of the desire to house the many varied bits and pieces of data that I come across every day in a single data environment. I was dependent on too many specialized "silos" of information with limited or non-existent capability for interoperability and repurposing.
Initially, the Wiki concept had me. It's ease of use ultimately trumped all of the various content-management and knowledge-management alternatives, but Wiki implementations didn't have a formal system to capture the nature of the relationships modeled by the linking from page to page. A link from one page to another was just a link, lacking definition, and provided no way to model the resulting web as anything but a flat web.
What I really wanted was a way to describe a link. For example, lets say we had a page called "LukeSkywalker". On that page there might be a link to "DarthVader". I wanted a way to record a description of the relationship between Luke and Darth using some kind of easy in-line markup. I was aware of the Semantic Web, which uses RDF triples to define relationships, but the syntax was very non-Wiki and extraordinarily ugly-- far too complicated for the casual user (let alone a 20+ year computer programming veteran like myself!)
I decided to make my own Wiki which allowed entries to be descriptively linked. So on the "LukeSkywalker" page, our "DarthVader" link could be written like "DarthVader>>Father". This makes it possible to query the system for things like "?Who>>Father>>LukeSkywalker" and get an answer. With enough information, we could query the system to find out all of the fathers of Jedi Knights, "?Who>>Father>>?Jedi && JediKnight>>Occupation>>?Jedi".
The possibilities are actually quite extraordinary once you start playing with the concept. What's even weirder is that the technology to do it is not complicated and yet I haven't EVER seen it done in a simple and usable way (at least to my liking.) And I have tried hundreds of different software packages in the search for something like this.
So simply put, Juju aims at solving the "too-many information silos" problem by providing a simple Wiki-like database engine with powerful querying and summarization functions, to bring the data to life in a way that is useful for casual users and extraordinarily powerful for people who want to take the simple framework to the limit.
Juju is written in Java and was designed for a MySQL database, though it should support any common database engine through JDBC. It is designed to be usable as an engine to plug into other software and will ship with a simple desktop client GUI and (eventually) a Web Interface.
Juju draws its inspiration from many sources, most notably: Wiki, Semantic Web, RCS (Revision Control System), CVS (Concurrent Version System), Blogging Systems (such as Blogger, Livejournal, and MovableType), SQL (Structured Query Language), and THE/Archy (www.raskincenter.org).
[end]
Status
------
Your request should be reviewed by SourceForge.net staff in the next two business days (9AM to 5PM, Monday through Friday). Response regarding your project (notice of rejection/approval) will be posted to your >My SourceForge.net Projects page (accessible via the My SF.net link at the top of each site page). No email notification will be provided about approval/rejection of your project.
More to come.
Project Information
-------------------
1. Submitter: brendanavery
2. Project UNIX Name: juju
3. Project Descriptive Name: Juju
4. License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
License other:
5. Project Description: Juju is a personal/collaborative knowledge management engine combining principles of Wiki and the Semantic Web. The initial version is produced in Java with support for most common relational database engines (initial testing performed with MySQL.)
6. Registration Description:
I created Juju initially as a personal information manager, out of the desire to house the many varied bits and pieces of data that I come across every day in a single data environment. I was dependent on too many specialized "silos" of information with limited or non-existent capability for interoperability and repurposing.
Initially, the Wiki concept had me. It's ease of use ultimately trumped all of the various content-management and knowledge-management alternatives, but Wiki implementations didn't have a formal system to capture the nature of the relationships modeled by the linking from page to page. A link from one page to another was just a link, lacking definition, and provided no way to model the resulting web as anything but a flat web.
What I really wanted was a way to describe a link. For example, lets say we had a page called "LukeSkywalker". On that page there might be a link to "DarthVader". I wanted a way to record a description of the relationship between Luke and Darth using some kind of easy in-line markup. I was aware of the Semantic Web, which uses RDF triples to define relationships, but the syntax was very non-Wiki and extraordinarily ugly-- far too complicated for the casual user (let alone a 20+ year computer programming veteran like myself!)
I decided to make my own Wiki which allowed entries to be descriptively linked. So on the "LukeSkywalker" page, our "DarthVader" link could be written like "DarthVader>>Father". This makes it possible to query the system for things like "?Who>>Father>>LukeSkywalker" and get an answer. With enough information, we could query the system to find out all of the fathers of Jedi Knights, "?Who>>Father>>?Jedi && JediKnight>>Occupation>>?Jedi".
The possibilities are actually quite extraordinary once you start playing with the concept. What's even weirder is that the technology to do it is not complicated and yet I haven't EVER seen it done in a simple and usable way (at least to my liking.) And I have tried hundreds of different software packages in the search for something like this.
So simply put, Juju aims at solving the "too-many information silos" problem by providing a simple Wiki-like database engine with powerful querying and summarization functions, to bring the data to life in a way that is useful for casual users and extraordinarily powerful for people who want to take the simple framework to the limit.
Juju is written in Java and was designed for a MySQL database, though it should support any common database engine through JDBC. It is designed to be usable as an engine to plug into other software and will ship with a simple desktop client GUI and (eventually) a Web Interface.
Juju draws its inspiration from many sources, most notably: Wiki, Semantic Web, RCS (Revision Control System), CVS (Concurrent Version System), Blogging Systems (such as Blogger, Livejournal, and MovableType), SQL (Structured Query Language), and THE/Archy (www.raskincenter.org).
[end]
Status
------
Your request should be reviewed by SourceForge.net staff in the next two business days (9AM to 5PM, Monday through Friday). Response regarding your project (notice of rejection/approval) will be posted to your >My SourceForge.net Projects page (accessible via the My SF.net link at the top of each site page). No email notification will be provided about approval/rejection of your project.
More to come.