WikiSym 2008 Day 3
The third and last day of WikiSym started with another keynote. Stewart Nickolas from IBM presented what he and his team did on the QEDWiki. Based on a WikkaWiki they created a system to easily mashup data from various sources using connected JavaScript Widgets. There aren't many wiki like mechnisms left in their implementation except that they use the revision system to store the widgets.
It was interesting nontheless. IBM is very active in the OpenAjax Alliance. One of their goals is to standardize the protocols to access different JavaScript widgets and exchange data between them. I have to investigate what is possible in that direction already.
Nickolas also talked a bit about how the massive amount of data created in the Web 2.0 and what he called the upcoming “Petabyte Age” can be handled. One example he gave was Google's map reduce tool Hadoop.
I then visited a panel on application wikis. The most challenging problem in giving end users ways to create applications in a wiki seems to find a balance between power and simplicity. None of the existing application wikis seem to have sufficiently solved this, yet.
Because I had to catch my plane I had to leave after lunch, which is a bit sad because there were some interesting talks in the afternoon and the TikiWiki guys were throwing a party at the evening. But Dario Taraborelli grabbed me right before lunch to talk a bit about his wikitracker idea again (I mentioned it on Day 1). This is the most interesting thing I take with me from this year's WikiSym and I hope we can make it happen.
Again this WikiSym was worth attending and I enjoyed chatting with “old friends” as well as meeting a lot of new interesting people.
Here are a few links to make up for the lack of links in my posts 
This post was originally published on cosmocode.de