OWTRTA - One Wiki to Rule Them All
Last updated at 6:46 pm UTC on 19 March 2007
Mentor:
Keith Hodges (Google Account: keith_hodges@yahoo.co.uk)
Project Outline
Develop a wiki translation engine using Pier, enabling Pier to routinely read and write other wiki formats. Using a configuration of Pier with the OODBMS Magma as a back end, test and explore scalability issues with the goal of importing wikipedia. The ability to have a full text search of the persisted data is required.
Technical details
Pier is a wiki engine designed explicitly to be extensible and scalable. Unlike the majority of wiki implementations Pier has a very clean design which uses a number of classic design patterns. Wiki formatted content is read using a parser into its internal object-model representation, the parser is generated from a parser compiler.
Benefits to the Student
This project will be beneficial to any Computer Science student, reflecting much of what they will have been taught. It will providing a learning opportunity through exposure to the full, clean, source code of every facet of these particular technologies, which represent the best of their class, in terms of their design. For example, as a starting point the student will begin by learning how to use a compiler-compiler as a parser generator.
Benefits to the community
A large amount of information is being held in legacy wiki's, within the squeak community alone wiki.squeak.org has almost 6000 pages. Pier needs some enhancements before it is ready to take up the mantel.
Magma is a relatively new OODBMS, which is beginning to be used in some commercial environments and these would benefit greatly from the scalability testing involved in this project. Full-text search capabilities are needed by projects such as Gjallar
Miscellaneous Notes and ideas:
