PiggyDB

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Nov 10, 2012 at 07:58 PM

I posted here http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/4445/0/anybody-met-this-outliner
the following statement

>By the way, Piggydb is evolving nicely into a paradigm much more solid than wikis.

and Dr Andus, most undesrtandable, asked me to support it.

>That’s a bold claim ;) Would you care to elaborate? (I’m intrigued by Piggydb but haven’t had time to test drive it).

It makes sense to do so in the Piggydb thread. I’ve already posted just above the main characteristics of knowledge structring in Piggydb. I will now explain why I believe that this approach is more ‘solid’ than a wiki’s.

First of all, what do I mean by ‘solid’ in knowledge management? I refer to the extent that a tool supports an organisation of concepts conducive to higher levels of conceptualisation.

The way I see it, concepts are represented by ‘entities’ in the sense discussed here http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/4266 i.e. different tools will use different kinds of entities as basic building blocks.

In a wiki, the entity is the wiki page. However, because the main connectors between pages are the hyperlinked words, it becomes easy to create pages with several concepts. Not so in Piggydb where, since the main connectors (relationships) are set for each entity (‘fragment’) as a whole, it supports the user to maintain only one concept per entity. I believe that this is conducive to mental discipline and to clearer descriptions of concepts.

Also, in a wiki, tags can be used to label pages, but they cannot be organised themselves—they are just part of a long flat list- so their contribution ends there. Piggydb allows the hierarchical organisation of tags, supporting conceptual development at the meta-level too. Assume that you are making a database of living organisms: you can have entities under hierarchical tags Kingdom / Phylum / Class / Order / Family / Genus / Species, as well as a multitude of other possible sets of terms.

By the way, here’s part of what the developer himself has written; if you follow his blog, it seems that he’s got a pretty clear vision:
http://piggydb.net/2012/09/25/lets-play-piggydb-knowledge-creation-1-on-writing-by-stephen-king/