Wiki Software I

In daily life, my blog is my knowledge management software, my knowledge base. I blog a lot about Java technology and software engineering, cause that's my area of expertise, at least that's what I want it to be someday. Java is a broad technology and unfortunately I tend to forget things easily, so whenever I have one of these "wait I heard about this sometime" moments, I search my blog and get the information I want - or at least the link where I can find more information. So I think it is very important to have a knowledge base, which not only supports you when looking up information, but can also be helpful when documenting e.g. software. Look at JBoss, they are using a wiki base application to document/support their products.

I know there is Google, which covers billions of websites, but personally I think it's difficult sometimes to find the right information. If you start a Google search with a Java related keyword, you'll probably get hundreds of pages and you have no idea which site contains the information you are looking for. That's one reason why I started my blog, to get the information I'm looking for without going through dozens of links. Another nifty thing I introduced to my blog is an article rating, which I use to quantify the quality of an article I read.

For my upcoming thesis I want to use a similar approach, the requirements are the same: I need information, fast and easy! The technical conditions are not the same though. I'm looking for a knowledge management software, which must work as a standalone application, meaning no additional server or database needs to be installed. Furthermore it has to work on a usb flash stick, so that I can use it on any computer. I know a web application suits these technical requirements perfectly, but I will be working offline from time to time. I'd also like to have a glossary like solution, maybe with export capability to use the data in my preparation. I think for all these requirements a wiki based application is the best choice.