4. NATURE OF COMPASS (WIKI)

COMPASS has been built as a “wiki”. According to Wikipedia, a wiki is “computer software that allows users to easily create, edit and link web pages. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites, power community websites, and are increasingly being installed by businesses to provide affordable and effective intranets or for use in knowledge management. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as ‘the simplest online database that could possibly work’. One of the best-known wikis is Wikipedia (itself).”      (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki)

Two interesting facts: (1) the word “wiki” is a shortened version of “wikiwiki”, which is Hawaiian for “quick”; (2) there now (2008) are 2.9 million entries in the English language version alone of Wikipedia.

It is important to note that COMPASS really is a collection of source cases, each composed of variables (operons) and associated bivariate (two variable) relationships (kineses). It is not a single big collection, like Wikipedia, of terms and descriptions. The structure of COMPASS roughly follows that of the GenBank® (which has sets – “sequences” - of genes from respective biological organisms). The premise is that most users of COMPASS will be thinking in terms of specific situations (cases) rather than the more difficult to imagine whole world of public administration.

The net upshot of this structure is that COMPASS consists of a main wiki, which has a summary page for each source case. Each full case then is a separate but linked wiki of its own. COMPASS, as in the figure [TP Page1], thus is a “wiki of wikis”.

The preceding describes the "Source Case Wiki" view. There are four other views: (1) Causal diagram, (2) Variables in a List; (3) Variables in Categories, and (4) Variables in Relationships. The latter three combine all the cases in one big wiki, respectively. (See http://compassvarlists.pbworks.com, http://compassvariablesincategories.pbworks.com, and http://compasscases.pbworks.com).

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