Breaking System Boundaries
The heart of the KiWi system will be a reusable platform that provides the shared functionalities that are necessary for many or even most different kinds of social software services. The KiWi system thus allows social software developers to easily build and adapt new services as they are required, e.g. within enterprises or on public social software sites.

Core functionalities required by social software systems are:

  • representation of many different content formats, e.g. text, images, etc.
  • easy linking between content items
  • versioning and change tracking of content items
  • annotation of content with meta-data, e.g. in the form of tags
  • rating and commenting of content by users
  • integration of different content items using machine-readable connections (e.g. RDF)
  • user management, user profiles, and social networking
  • personalisation and context adaptation
  • reputation and incentive system (using Sun’s Community Equity Specification)
  • information extraction
  • reasoning and recommendation system (e.g. for tags)

In the course of the project, KiWi will implement all or at least most of these core functionalities. KiWi could thus simply be seen as a framework that allows software developers to more easily build social software applications for knowledge sharing and knowledge management.

However, KiWi goes further, and this is where the boundaries between systems are breaking: the KiWi system will also allow to build different kinds of social software services in the same instance using the same content. For example, the same photos used in a photo sharing service like Flickr  could be used in a service for sharing travel stories like on Tripwolf  and in a learning community blog and forum like the Digital Photography School.

Furthermore, every user of the KiWi system can become a developer of the platform itself, because KiWi treats functionality and user interface components (“widgets”) like any other content item that can collaboratively be created, edited, and used. In this way, the community together can build innovative and new social software services by combining different functionalities created by users.

This functionality will be realised by integrating the Zembly  system, which allows users to collaboratively create widgets that can be reused in different platforms. Zembly is currently under development by project partner Sun Microsystems.

The KiWi system is in this sense “breaking system boundaries”.

Next article in this section:

Breaking information boundaries