ORows
Organized knowledgebase for teams with spreadsheet like UI
I've been thinking about computable knowledge for a while now. The world's most used business application is Excel. Excel is table datastructure as a service. Trello is a todo list datastructure as a service. AirTable took tables to the next level. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-different/
But knowledge inherently is like a graph. Things connecting to other things. There isn't a service that lets you edit such a datastructure with a great UX.
The idea isn't fully fledged out but I'm connecting some hunches. JSON is everywhere. It is the most common format for data exchange. Almost every programming language makes it easy to work with json. Editing it is a pain though, setting schemas, validators yada yada. JSON is a tree datastructure. With simple links, JSON is a graph datastructure.
The first step is to create a great JSON viewer and editor. Anyone should be able to create models, collaborate on it, set schemas, validations, computable views, webhooks e.t.c
It should be so easy that someone could use ORows as their admin interface to their simple website. Consume the JSON, wire it to a simple view and tada! a working app.
In the next interation I want to double down on ontological concepts. Help the world to represent computable knowledge. We should be able to ask free form questions and the computer should be able to infer and give us informative answers that help us make decisions. I want this to be open source.
I haven't fully thought things down. Deep down I have a hunch that having a computable knowledge tool that is not locked down by BigCos will help us solve the big problems of the future.
2 Comments
This is quite interesting.
I think this is precisely what https://notion.so/product is doing. Is not exactly as you describe it but I can see they're providing the UX to build and connect pieces of data and transform them into information. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think about it.
Both notion and AirTable are very interesting. I think the computable knowledge space is huge and a lot of room to grow. Notion feels like more for notes. Both have blocks and are definitely powerful. You're right as there is a lot of shared space.
For ORows I want to focus more on schemas, validation and data governance side of it. Kind of like how github lets you create branches and pull requests.
So in essence, I'm dreaming up ORows as a github for rich, structured & computable data.