Anything Else

Openlibrary is to library as wikipedia was to encyclopedia. I am a fan of everyone contributing to build a good resource for the benefit of human kind at a large, but am not a fan of wiki. Structured data gets decompressed into globs of text. Am really glad openlibrary is not on that path:

infogami

... Infogami is a cleaner, simpler wiki. But unlike other wikis, it has the flexibility to handle different classes of data. Most wikis only let you store unstructured pages -- big blocks of text. Infogami lets you store semistructured data, just like ThingDB does, as well as use ThingDB's query powers to sort through it.

Each infogami page (i.e. something with a URL) has an associated type. Each type contains a schema that states what fields can be used with it and what format those fields are in. Those are used to generate view and edit templates which can then be further customized as a particular type requires.

The result, as you can see on the Open Library site, is that one wiki contains pages that represent books, pages that represent authors, and pages that are simply wiki pages, each with their own distinct look and edit templates and set of data.

I wrote about a similar structured wiki-sh idea sometime back, wikidBASE.

Imagine if the entire content of wikipedia was structured. Pages on people were really had a Person object belonging to it, with data_of_birth, first_name, last_name as fields that one can do queries on, do field search, sort things. Imagine the same for all Countries, Cities, Events, Company, Product etc with reasonable fields. That would have been HUGE!