Swik is "the free and open database of Open Source projects that anyone can edit". Trying to make better documentation for OSS projects. Also trying to make it easier to find OSS projects (solve the "which is the right project for me?" question).
For documentation, they looked into the Wiki concept. And because Wiki's are great, that is the route that Swik chose. Sounds like a simplistic Wiki -- they aren't using Textile or Markdown or anything.
For organization, they are pursuing tagging (ala del.icio.us). Don't need to worry about hierarchy or anything -- can just assign the tags that fit, and let the system sort it out. Tag analysis will afford another level of organization and capability for finding OSS projects (future).
Going back to documentation, didn't want to repeat documentation work that has already been done. RSS is the most popular way to get data about OSS projects. Aggregating RSS feeds for OSS projects? Also going after Web Services, for example using the freshmeat WS API to do integration with freshmeat.
From the demo, Swik looks very Google-like from the UI. Typing in a search term brings back a page that is a composite of several web services. Every project found builds a new record in Swik. This can be edited (Wiki-style), to add additional information, metadata (tags), etc.
I played around with Swik a bit, and it looks pretty cool. I added two projects, Unison and Joe, and it is pretty painless to get new data into the system. For the default homepage, it picks the Google "I'm feeling lucky" link, which I think is often wrong. The reason why, is because freshmeat doesn't publish the homepage for a project via their Web Service (and it might violate their TOS to spider it).
They are working on Open Sourcing Swik, and are soliciting comments about how to do it. Go to the Swik project on Swik to comment.
-Andy.
Posted by andyr at August 3, 2005 12:14 PM