Rhizome Wiki 0.6.0 review

Rhizome is a Wiki-like content management and delivery system that exposes the entire site -- content, structure, and metadata as edi

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Adam Souzis

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Rhizome is a Wiki-like content management and delivery system that exposes the entire site -- content, structure, and metadata as editable RDF. This means that instead of just creating a site with URLs that correspond to a page of HTML, with Rhizome you can create URLs that represent just about anything, such as:

structural components of content (such as a bullet point or a definition).
abstract entities that can be presented in different ways depending on the context.
relationships between entities or content, such as annotations or categories.

Rhizome is designed to enable non-technical users to create these representations in an easy, ad-hoc manner. To this end, it includes a text formatting language which similar to a Wiki's but lets you author arbitrary XML content and RDF metadata. And for developers, this allows both content and structure to be easily repurposed and complex web applications rapidly developed.

The long-term vision is that each Rhizome site will intertwine together, forming an emergent fuzzy taxonomy over a peer-to-peer network.

The nearer-term goals of Rhizome are:

To allow (relatively) non-technical folk to create "Semantic web"-enabled web sites.
To provide a platform for the rapid-development of web applications
To provide a test-bed for experimenting with new forms of collaborative knowledge production and communication
A showcase and test-bed for its underlying technologies: Rx4RDF, ZML, and Raccoon

Here are some key features of "Rhizome Wiki":
Wiki ease

All the functionality of a Wiki: public and automatic creation of pages and links using simple text formatting rules
But the same formatting rules can used to author arbitrary HTML, XML and RDF
And you can create and edit not just content but also the metadata, site structure and appearance, even application behavior
Including dynamic pages: supports XSLT, RxSLT, Python, RxUpdate
Thus enabling dynamic, rule and context based presentation of content

Advanced Content Management functionality

pages can consist of any content: xml, html, binary, etc.
content, metadata and site structure is a stored as RDF: enabling it be repurposable, human editable, application agnostic, etc.
flexible authorization and security model
staging/release workflow
native versioning of content and metadata, conflict detection
supports local file system or browser-based development
can generate static websites
import/export of content and metadata
flexible backend: supports multiple RDF engines (Redland, 4Suite, RDFLib) with multiple datastores: file based, SQL databases, embeddable databases (Sleepycat, Metakit)

XHTML or arbitrary XML can be authored in ZML in a manner very similar to Wiki text formatting rules. Rhizome comes with built-in support for Apache Forrest document types and has preliminary support for DocBook. You can also easily view and edit RDF metadata for the site using RxML.

Almost all of Rhizome's functionality can be found its dynamic pages, which are written in RxSLT, XSLT, and RxUpdate. These can be edited like any other page, making it easy to add and change functionality without restarting the server. You can use RxUpdate to migrate the underlying schema at run-time. Rhizome supports fine-grained authorization and versioning of both metadata and content, so you have some guard rails too.

What's New in This Release:
This release adds "shredding": a framework (including GRDDL support) for extracting RDF from content and maintaining the relationship between them over time.
It also includes better support for viewing and editing RDF directly with most RDF formats.
There are also several UI enhancements, including a new UI for managing users and roles, more Wiki features, and page and comment spam detection via the Akismet service.
Last but not least, it is several times faster than previous releases.