I’ve seen TiddlyWiki some months ago, and the idea and the non-linear written capacity has impressed me so much…

A TiddlyWiki is like a blog because it’s divided up into neat little chunks, but it encourages you to read it by hyperlinking rather than sequentially: if you like, a non-linear blog analogue that binds the individual microcontent items into a cohesive whole.

From Kemitix.net :

A self-contained HTML file that is a Wiki.
Editing the file locally it rewrites itself on disk as you save changes. There are a number of customisations that people have done to it, including one to use it hosted on a server.
I’ve been quite content with the basic Tiddler.
It is a wonderful demonstration of what you can do with javascript and a web browser, as if GMail and Google Maps weren’t good enough examples.

Or from another point of view, “The world as I see it“:

Ignore the silly name and focus in on the fact that this is a handy little wiki that can function like your own localized Wikipedia. And it’s totally portable, which means you can store it on a keydrive, email to yourself, whatever you want.
A very interesting tool, IMHO…

Another description from inolleb.com:

As it mentions, it is a single html file that contains everything you need. You then create tiddlers using WikiWords.
Tiddlers are blocks of information that link to other blocks of information and the links can continue infinately.
Ultimately it is extremely hard to describe. You will just have to check it out for yourself.

And finally some ideas about how it can be used for…from

The beauty of TiddlyWiki wasn’t apparent to me until I realized the portability, and what a slick little tool it could be for notetaking, personal portfolio building, and other kinds of process documentation.

I am going to play with it some more—could it fill the gap between the server-based wiki engines (which are perfect for me in most ways, but not portable and not available offline) and dedicated, proprietary products like OneNote and EverNote?
My concern is that the single file and Javascript construction will become taxed rather quickly with a lot of content… but maybe that’s where linked TiddlyWikis come in. After all, it is a “micro-content publisher.”
Probably with a lot of data there are problems, but the main aspect is IMHO that with tihs tool you CONTROL your data in a STANDARD way ( the Web paradigm ) instead in a proprietary program is the program itself that CONTROLS YOUR data…

So when yesterday I’ve found it and I saw the progress made so far… I have began to think if there is a way to make it better with a sort of RDF backend…

I mean the triddlers are fantastic: are pieces of information that are a block div and that have permalinks…

The data are all in the document source itself, and using DOM and javascript you can edit and modify it… so locally it’s a wonderful tool… and if you have a server you can upgrade it daily..

But what next? Semantic tecnologies are capable to “make” a wonderful idea a sort of killer application?

Making an RDF enviroment

In this context there are two different main problems:

  • how to save the data of the page
  • identify as much metadata as possible to use it in RDF form

For now i don’t consider the first point, but only the second…

Imagine that we have every tiddles about a theme and it has a permalink: now if you are over the tiddler there is a menu with a “references” option: clicking on it you can see all the tiddlers that are linking to the current one…

Using RDF we can have a situation like this one:

tiddlersOne has some internal links, that are represents as RDF triples:

  • urn:About rdf:SeeAlso TiddlyWiki
  • …and the menu “”references” can be populated using a query** SPARQL** like this:

SELECT ?value
WHERE ?sub rdf:SeeAlso ?value

AND ?sub eq urn:About

This is one of the possible ways to make a simple idea also compatible with Semantic Web approach…
So tha page can be understood also by machines than by humans…

Some considerations…

The success key of TiddlyWiki is in its portability and in its non-linear taking notes capability…

And it has a view capable of infinite scrolling top-down, and capable to show us small pieces of information in a non-linear way…

Using RDF represents an overhead and a plus complexity but why not use it?

I think in this context the better way is to make info available using a GRDDL approach to extract data when RDF data is needed…
If there is a solid RDF framework also for Javascript probably we can have a small script without any other RDF framework…as RAP or Redland or others…

When I have a clearer idea in my mind i’ll extend this post…
Meanwhile if anyone has others ideas, he’s welcome :)

References:

-> TiddlyWiki - official site
-> A tutorial on TiddlyWiki
-> GTDTiddlyWiki
-> Are you Local?
-> I’m back
-> My New Organizer
-> QwikiWeb - a WebsiteOriented adaptation of TiddlyWiki