postgis / mediawiki / postgresql was Re: [Freegis-list] Re: [GENERAL] Map of Postgresql Users (OT)

[Anselm Hook]

An interesting bit of commentary from another list regarding structured
wiki's:

> On Friday 28 October 2005 06:44, Arnulf Christl wrote:
> > Yet another idea:  Mediawiki (the
> > Wikipedia software) is also right now introducing geometries to the Wiki
> > database - obviously also using PostgreSQL/PostGIS. This would be
> > another cool multiplier.. and there we also meet with Google again.
>
> Wha? mediawiki is planning to use postgis with thier software? I'm currently
> working with some folks on a working port of wikimedia to postgresql
> (allowing things like transactions and full text searching all in the same
> database). That would certainly seem to dovetail into this... you have any
> links I could read up on the wikipedia/postgis effort on ?
>
> --
> Robert Treat
> Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

Interesting for a couple of reasons:

  1) Twiki, Ning, Salesforce, Jotspot, Google base, Openguides and others
are now attempting to provide generic datastores...  These datastores seem
to all be elliptically grazing the idea of RDF despite admonitions to the
contrary [ they're semi-structured, define schemas 'in grammer' and use
world unique subject identifiers among other things ].

  2) There seems to be a burgeoning new literacy (apparently there was a
talk on this subject at oscon 2005).  It could very well be that in the
near future we're going to see an inability to program being looked at as
something of a handicap; much like not being able to type.  This
also may imply pressure on software authoring tools to become perhaps not
simpler but more consistent; something way beyond what ruby on rails does
today... more like some kind of wizard or lego building block tool.

  - a