A Wiki Way Of Programming For The Web Of Data

International audienceWikiNEXT is a wiki engine that enables users to write rapidly applications directly from the browser, in particular applications that can exploit the web of data. WikiNEXT relies on semantic web formalisms and technologies (RDF/RDFa lite) to describe wiki page content and embedded metadata, and to manipulate them (for example, using the SPARQL language). WikiNEXT is a mix between a web-based IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and a semantic wiki. It embeds several editors (a WYSIWYG editor, and an HTML/JavaScript editor + a JavaScript library manager) for coding in the browser, provides an API for exploiting semantic metadata, and uses a graph based data store and an object oriented database for persistence on the server side. It has been specially designed for writing online programming tutorials (i.e. an HTML5 tutorial, a semantic web tutorial on how to consume linked data, etc.), or more generally for developing web applications that can be mixed with more classical wiki documents (in fact all WikiNEXT pages are web applications). The tool is online 1 , open source 2 ; screencasts are available on YouTube (look for "WikiNEXT")