Nobody gets their organizational systems right the first time — it always has to evolve a bit. So it goes with data.
That’s why we invented Wagn. Wagn is about growing structure organically. By infusing wikis with database power, you can start with a messy heap and end up with a crystalline pyramid; that’s data getting rich.
See what we mean at Wagn.org and Hooze.org — both are built from our open-source Wagn application.
Wikis are the web’s most powerful and elegant collaborative writing tools. They allow communities of users to create and edit public pages right through their browsers. The tremendous success of Wikipedia, which has recently been in the news both for comparing favorably to the much smaller Encyclopedia Brittanica in independent reviews and for reaching its millionth article, is but a taste of what is to come from the world of wikis.
Tagging is the web’s most powerful and elegant categorization tool. By applying little labels, or “tags” to items (like, for example, products and companies) users put them into groups. Sites like del.icio.us, flickr, and Google’s gmail have grown wildly popular letting users share and sort bookmarks, photos, and email respectively.
Combining the two yields some wonderful things:
wagging wikis can be used like databases: tags give wikis structure, so users can record, sort, group, query, and filter information without having to learn one bit of fancy syntax.
wagging tags are easy to describe and explain, so users can work with others to co-create meaningful schemes for organizing information
by breaking pages into finer grain details, wagging tags let users customize dynamic wiki pages to their interests, so that the information they see is the information they trust and care about most.
