Can TWiki be made to have self schematizing data? How can self schematizing data, and data schemas such as seem to be provided by twiki forms, be combined?

Many database have static schema - descriptions of the data, fieldnames, allowed values, etc. Changing the database schema is often a pain.

Self schematizing data has the description of the data in the file. E.g. I wrote PerlSQL to do exactly that. Each record could have an arbitrary number of fields, and the SQL queries treated fields that were not present as flavours of NULL.

One of the joys of XML is that it is even more powerful. You can add arbitrary fiels within

 <newfield>foo</newfield> 

but they can be related to each other sequentially, etc. But, further, if you wish you can write a DTD and enforce a schema on all or part of the data.

Q: does TWiki handle self schematization? How?

E.g. TWiki forms appear to be a fixed schema. But, several pieces of TWiki seem to follow a convention, like above, of

• Variable name: value
• TWiki version: (TWiki version: 01 Feb 2003)
• Perl version: 5.6.1
• Web server & version: Apache

It's not clear to me if there are standard tools in TWiki for such self schematization.

Are there? Am I missing them?

See WantPerlSQL?

-- AndyGlew - 15 Apr 2003

I've been pondering how spontaneous grouping / self organizing units might be added to wikis. The current method of users adding a list Related Topic links is self organizing but high maintenance and quickly grows out of date. The only automated method I've been able to conceive of so far is some kind of content and frequency analysis using word counts. E.g. all the topics in Codev talking with high counts of the words 'hierarchies, trees, directories' are probably related to each other. A simple regular expression search works as a proof of concept. This approach would miss topics which are conceptually related but don't use the same language. For example a page using the self organizing behaviour of slime molds and single cell algae colonies as a metaphor would be missed. Still I think there is enough low hanging fruit in this direction worth pursuing.

-- MattWilkie - 16 Apr 2003

moved from SelfSchematizingTWikiData

-- WillNorris - 25 Jul 2004

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