I Guess I Didn't Really Get Wikis

I'm familiar with Wikis; in fact I've used them -- I've made modest postings to Wikipedia for example.

But it turns out I really didn't get it.

Anton Huenermann and colleagues in Open Text have developed a Livelink Wiki feature. It would be easy to see Wikis as yet another Livelink collaborative feature along with Discussion Groups, Forums, Task List, News Channels, etc. Easy, but Wrong!

Wikis, as you may know, are a way to edit documents that appear as a webpage. One of the ideas is that documents develop by consensus. In the aforementioned Wikipedia, people write encyclopedia articles that appear as webpages, and then others amend and add material. Over time the richness and accuracy of individual articles, relationships between them and the overall collection size and quality improve. Previous versions are kept and it is possible to rollback if someone makes bad changes. Group consensus rules over time.

You could argue that the online editor feature of Livelink Enterprise Server, combined with open permissions could allow users to have this kind of a wiki experience -- easy editing by anyone with version control and rollback capabilities. What is different is that users would be editing a document (Word, text, html) that they would see as an object on a Livelink page but would have to open. In the case of a wiki, the document is the webpage.

There is a very fundamental paradigm at the core of Livelink ES and that is the representation of a list of documents in a folder/container hierarchy. As many have commented, Livelink appears as a web-based file system with a lot of other features.

Over time there have been many refinements to the appearance of a Livelink ES page, but the fundamental idea of a file list remains. We have even created modules like Appearance and Expressions that change the layout of Livelink pages -- change everything but the file listing in the center.

The other thing that is different about Wikis is the easy way to make links between different documents/pages. In fact it is so easy there is no visible hierarchy of content objects since such a hierarchy makes no sense. Any page may refer to any other page for any of a range of reasons related to context or meaning. To be accurate, in the case of the Livelink Wiki, a breadcrumb trail can be shown, but it is not usually relevant to user navigation.

So for the first time in Livelink ES, there is no file listing on pages and your position in a hierarchy is not apparent.

Content Management Systems Are Second Class Systems for the Rich

Actually the article I'm going to mention is called, "Databases Are So 20th Century" by Dave Kellogg in CMS Watch. I found it an interesting read for the start of a new year.

Kellogg's basic thesis is that database systems can never handle content well, and that the current efforts to manage content as XML in databases is now the fourth attempt to address the problem and is doomed to failure. As he says:

"First, you need to abandon the notion that content is a special case of data. Indeed, it's the other way around; data is a special case of content that happens be highly regular in structure."

What of content management systems? Kellogg says:

"Just as poor countries have rich residents, there is an upper class of content that gets to live in databases (e.g., corporate web content, aircraft repair manuals, new drug applications). Typically, this is accomplished through enterprise content management (ECM) systems that both break the content into bite-sized morsels that fit into relational "square tables" and track metadata about it (e.g., author, version, check-in status, required approvals).

So while upper-class content enjoys life in a database, the great irony is that ECM typically treats the content itself as opaque -- because of the limitations in the underlying database system. That is, while ECM tracks and manages a lot of information about the content, it actually does relatively little to help get inside content. Despite its middle name, ECM today isn't really about content. It's about metadata."

Since it doesn't appear that Kellogg's ideal system is likely to appear anytime soon, I guess we can go on selling and using ECM systems for some time! Happy New Year!

Giving Thanks

The weekend before last was Thanksgiving in Canada. I had a good weekend, but not as good as this last weekend. On Saturday afternoon there was a rain shower, and then the sky mostly cleared. I decided to go for a walk as the trees are at showing their peak Fall colours. Fortunately I remembered to take my camera with me.





It was one of those magical times: the low angle of the sun, raindrops sparkling, the Fall colours… I found myself almost ravenously running from one spot to the next to get as many pictures as I could before the light failed. Short of taking a picture of my foot, it was almost impossible not to get a good shot.





When the light and my camera battery finally failed, I came home exhilarated and truly thankful.









- Happy Thanksgivings to you all, whenever you actually celebrate!!

DIY satellites reinvent the space race

I love the idea of enabling something then seeing what people make of it. The following quotation says it best:

"I kind of look at this as the Apple II. The ordinary person can get something into space," said Bob Twiggs, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford

But, whereas the quotation references hobbyist computer hardware, the article is about miniature satellites!!

I love it.

NPS Pharmaceuticals: Medical Journal Reports Teduglutide Improves Intestinal Function in Patients With Short Bowel Syndrome

In a much earlier posting in April 2004 I wrote about my work years ago with Dr. Dan Drucker to develop a derivative of the human hormone GLP-2 to treat short bowel syndrome. NPS Pharmaceuticals, the acquirer of Allelix, my employer at the time, just released this news release about the positive results of a Phase 2 study and that they have now initiated a Phase 3 study. Yeah!!