PiggyDB

Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 10, 2012 at 09:54 PM

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>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.
> >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.

Thanks very much for that Alexander, this is very interesting.

As Chris has just pointed out, you can implement that behaviour with CT, provided you know how to do it (so it’s down to a personal decision and also sufficient knowledge of the tools) and you stay disciplined in doing it. I think Manfred Kuehn seems to use CT like such a knowledge base as well (built out of fragments).

I, on the other hand, use CT very differently, for my current project at least, to some extent violating the wiki principle of staying with short fragments, partly because it works for me that way but also because CT doesn’t discipline/restrict me that way.

I can see the appeal of Piggydb, at least the way you describe it, if it indeed forces one to implement such a bottom-up fragment-building approach and makes it easy to do so. It sounds like it’s trying to implement a bottom-up, “reverse-cascade,” “bubbling up” type abstraction process from the detailed data to its abstractions, which is something I’m trying it emulate in CT as well.

How stable is Piggydb at this stage of its development? I looked into it a while ago but for some reason it didn’t feel like it was mature enough yet for mission-critical projects. Also, I’d want some easy import-export options, to switch stuff back and forth.