Kneaver explained to a WordPress friend
Wordpress and Kneaver are made for very different goals, but it happens that many WordPress users could be interested to learn more about Kneaver. Comparing them could be a like a fast lane. WordPress’s mission is to allow bloggers to publish posts on the web. Kneaver’s mission is to allow life long learners to gather what they learned, wish to learn and share and with whom. Social, Knowledge and Social are the keywords. Semantic knowledge base is a technical description. Kneaver’s is not aimed to be a publishing platform but to be on the preparation side. If Wordpress is your dining room for serving posts, Kneaver is your kitchen to chop, ruminate your thoughts. It’s like a very private place in the back to prepare thoughts that could eventually be published and kept updated on WordPress. WordPress deals with posts while Kneaver deals with items which are usually small chunks of text. WordPress has limited capability in organizing posts relatively to others. Posts are seen as a flat list. Kneaver is network oriented and supports all kind of links between items. Kneaver aggregates on the fly items to form larger pieces. When Kneaver is used to push contents to WordPress, a post will typically correspond to one item with 10 inline sub items. Kneaver’s items are more like ideas, concepts, paragraphs, pictures, notes. WordPress deals with text, Kneaver ambitions to deal with meaning. For Kneaver, items are persons, concepts, places, organizations, principles, procedures. Kneaver schema can be manipulated directly by the user as he goes. The schema will define classes of items following “owl” standard but also class of relations, properties. WordPress has a unique system of categories. Categories are not posts and follow a hierarchical system. In Kneaver you define your taxonomies and how they interact. Adding an item to a category is just adding a link to between them. Elements of taxonomies are items like others. Templates will add behaviours to them. WordPress posts are bound to be displayed as articles. Kneaver items can be pictures, SVG graphics, and be output in a multitude of flexible ways: Mindmaps, sketch notes, posters, indexes, glossaries or posts. Depending on the rendering surface, some organization can take place like placing pictures relatively one to another, combining SVG elements or adding quantities. Everything is handled by templates. Templates can be simple text files with substitutions, or server side javascript or c++. WordPress is made to publish, It is planned to support a lot of connections from many different users. The workflow is straight: write, publish. Kneaver can be use for several purposes like learning, writing, designing presentations, filtering news, building applications. Kneaver is made as an application to be used intensively but by a small group of people. Best practices will depend on users. WordPress has limited provisions for confidentiality or progressive disclosure. Kneaver is hosted on a user basis, can be installed on small units and allows protection of items by defining access groups. Each item, each link can have a diffusion level. Remarks and notes will typically remain private even when an item is published. For Kneaver, 20 000 items is a small knowledge base. Navigation can be done by searches, by links or via several widgets like “recent items”, persons, books, concepts. With Kneaver, items are searched and matched based on their stems not just by string matching. Contexts will apply to allow short names to be used from nearby items. “My goal”, “my goals”, “Bruno Winck’s goals” will find the same results if I am Bruno Winck. “Write” will match with “written”, “wrote”, “writing”. WordPress has million of users and billions of readers. Kneaver is at early adopters stage.