WikiD : A WikiEngine Supporting Structured Data

Ward Cunningham describes a wiki as "the simplest online database that could possibly work". The cost of this simplicity is that wikis are generally limited to a single collection containing a single kind of record (viz. WikiMarkupLanguage records). WikiD extends the Wiki model to support multiple collections containing arbitrary schemas of XML records with minimal additional complexity. WikiD is essentially a lightweight framework combining: * Open-source implementations of various loosely-coupled open-standard protocols (e.g. OpenURL, SRW/U, SRW Update, OAI-PMH, RSS) * An open-source version-controlled database. * A set of bootstrap collections. * XSL Stylesheets to render collection-level open-standard protocol responses into HTML for human consumption. Automated processes can ignore the stylesheet reference and use the open-standard protocol responses directly. Possible applications for WikiD include collaborative maintenance of registries, thesauri, taxonomies, reviews, and documentation. In addition to a standard set of features available for all collections, custom code (e.g. Java or XSL) can also be assigned to provide new types of web services related to individual collections.