

Ask YC: wiki software for structured data - jasonlbaptiste

does anyone know if there is wiki like software for structured data?  has to be open source.<p>ie- mediawiki is basically for a blank page of information.<p>im looking for something that is like wikipedia, but the data entered is a set group of fields.  ie- title, link url, description, phone number, address
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tptacek
This answer is not super helpful, but anecdotally: this is how our product
works; it's a Wiki engine running on top of Subversion that parses, stores,
renders, and indexes valued "tags". We're using it right now to manage
firewall rulesets; our customers document firewalls and rules in a Wiki, and
to pull in relevant details from that documentation into their rulesets.

We wrote our own (in Ruby); it wasn't hard enough to do that we'd have
considered outsourcing that part. So, one contribution: consider just writing
it yourself.

Another contribution: this approach rocks a lot.

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deyan
I am not sure if this is what you need, but I have found <http://twiki.org/>
to be useful. Drupal is another solution - can be made into a wiki with a few
additions (which, however, can add up to quite a lot of extra time).

hopefully this helps, deyan

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bockris
I was also going to suggest twiki but I don't have any first hand experience
with it.

I have also looked at Roundup in the past. <http://roundup.sourceforge.net/>

WikidBASE is a fairly new but also in the same vein.
<http://projects.nickblundell.org.uk/wikidbase>

If a hosted solution is acceptable you can look at Dabble DB or Coghead

<http://dabbledb.com/> <http://www.coghead.com/>

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thorax
You can use MediaWiki and add Semantic MediaWiki extension to get something
closer to what you want. We use this a lot and get all sorts of structured
data (with RDFs, etc) when we need it, but freeform data around it.

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ntoshev
Not really what you want, but here is a nice showcase of what domain-specific
wiki combining text and structured data can look like:

<http://wikinvest.com>

Edit: Again not a Wiki, but Google Spreadsheets could also work for you

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vanekl
<http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/>

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babul
Perhaps choose something like dekiwiki and mod it to suit your need?

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SwellJoe
I want to like dekiwiki, because it looks awesome. But, egads, it's slow! It's
also kind confusing to use...which is surprising given all the work that's
gone into the UI.

And, of course, it doesn't have any real support for structured data. It's
just a really nice _looking_ wiki with the standard feature set (actually a
rather anemic feature set, which is fine for many purposes, since most wikis
are too damned complicated). Since structured data is the thing in this
request, it seems like there are probably better alternatives. I only know of
one wiki that deals with structured data (TWiki) but I'm betting there are
others. I seem to recall seeing discussion of wiki+spreadsheet style tools,
though I don't remember where or what.

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joshwa
Jotspot used to be like this until they were bought by Google...

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rglullis
Infogami is precisely what you want.

www.infogami.org

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jasonlbaptiste
wow, many thanks for the quggestions

