sniki

Sniki is a wiki with metadata. It's interesting to compare it to Diamond Wiki. Sniki uses a subject-verb-object predicate to encode metadata, just the way Diamond Wiki does, but in sniki the verb and object are themselves pages in the wiki. I think the approach taken by sniki is better. By making the verb and object pages in their own right, it gives you a natural way to encode things like hierarchy, access controls, visibility tweaks, etc simply as meta-metadata.

On the other hand, sniki doesn't have anything like Diamond Wiki's faceted navigation. It should be relatively straightforward to add some kind of faceted search to sniki, although I'd want to spend time thinking about what could be done with the additional structure in the object pages.

For example, if you use metadata between objects to encode topic hierarchies, you'd want that to be reflected in the faceted navigation presentation. That is, you don't want to bother the user with specific cities until they've chosen a country or state of interest. Should that be treated as simply a special case by the faceted navigation code, or is there a more general concept that could be applied to all kinds of inter-object structure?

Similarly, you could use inter-verb metadata to encode things like "don't present the genre choices until the user has specified that they're looking for either literature or movies". Again, would that kind of progressive-level-of-detail be a specific feature, or is it an instance of a more general feature?

In fact, given that both of those examples are basically about hiding some values until other values are chosen, it seems like they're both an instance of the same more general feature. Are there other features like this? I'm having trouble thinking of any at the moment.

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Posted on April 11, 2005 12:45 PM
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