Project

Platypus Wiki is an ongoing project started on 23th December 2003. We are distributing a pre-alpha version to test the concept, and have received some user feedback. If you want to try it, read the Download section to find how you can get it and the Installation section to install and run it.

Again, this is a pre-alpha version in an early stage of development, so it implements only a few features, but you can try it and see how it works.

Platypus Wiki is a Wiki Wiki Web but with some important differences. We've chosen HTMLarea v3.0rc1 as a WYSIWYG editor for creating content in (X)HTML. We are using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for presentation, and our intention is to be fully compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines v1.0 with Level AAA. Platypus Wiki lets you set "global" and "local" links. A global link is generated on every page: you just have to specify a word or phrase and the corresponding URL. A local link is similar, but only appears on a specified page. Another difference from the classical Wiki is the way links are specified in a page: instead of CamelWords, square brackets, etc., we use the convention namespace:pagename; this lets the user write content without worrying about namespace collisions. We also use RDF to represent the page space as a directed labeled graph. Each node in Platypus Wiki is both a Wiki page and an RDF resource. We are designing a navigation interface to simplify the interaction of users with the system and RDF metadata editing.

We are planning to implement a way to intercomunicate between different systems, aggregating content and metadata from different Platypus Wikis or other web sites. Our intention is to allow insertion of metadata related to any web resource and to develop ontologies in a collaborative way. We are considering doing this with a publish & subscribe mechanism, similar to trackback in Weblogs, but nothing is decided yet.