RichText

Swirrl is accepting public sign-ups

Posted by Ric Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:29:00 GMT

Swirrl, the project that I’ve been working on for a while now, has recently opened its doors to the public. You can now sign-up for free and try it out.

I’ve shamelessly plugged Swirrl a couple of times before in this blog, but never really explained what it does.

Basically, it’s a hosted wiki service, but instead of just allowing users to create text entries, it also allows the creation of what we call Data Set entries using a spreadsheet-like user interface. But it’s not just another simple online spreadsheet.

Using contextual clues provided by the user, Swirrl builds up a picture of your data and it’s structure behind the scenes, allowing some powerful searching and analysis. So, it’s it easy for the user to add semantic information to their data in the context of their normal work, with no need for any manual entry of semantic mark-up.

(Swirrl follows the principles of the Resource Description Framework, or RDF, which is one of the building blocks of the semantic web. However, you don’t need to know anything about RDF or the semantic web to use Swirrl).

So what’s the point of this? Well, with Swirrl we hope to help make the information held in an organization more accessible and exploitable. We hope that our approach provides a simple and effective way to collaborate and share information. With our Data Sets feature we aim to combine the power of a database and the flexibility of spreadsheets with the collaboration potential of a wiki.

Anyway, I’d love it if readers of this blog could sign up and have a play around, and let us know what you think (email hello@swirrl.com). We’re very keen to get some feedback and comments, so that the service can be improved. Thanks.