Yi-Tan Call 336: Managing Semi-Structured Data

Yi-Tan Call: Summary Version

Last week we talked about Google+, which with Facebook and a torrent of other sites is raising the volume of unstructured data in the world.

At the opposite end, for highly structured data, we have databases. What about what’s in between, especially when communities of practice are collaborating to curate it?

One nifty answer is Wagn, a platform that is more structured than wikis and less structured than straight-up databases. We’ve been migrating Yi-Tan onto Wagn. (You can see the list of all calls on Wagn here. Check out the tags!)

With lead Wagoneer Ethan McCutchen and frequent Yi-Tan contributor John Abbe, let’s discuss:

• How did Wagn come about? How does it handle semi-structured data?
• What are wikis, databases, newsfeeds and Wagn-like platforms best for?
• How might we all collaborate to create better shared assets using Wagn?