[pmwiki-users] [Off-Topic] Use of PmWiki for Requirements Modeling

[Marc Cooper]

Joachim Durchholz said...
> Marc Cooper schrieb:
> > 
> > The difficulty - if you can call it that - in setting up structured 
> > pages in PmWiki is that you have to do the relationship legwork 
> > yourself. That's a small price, imo, for the flexibility it affords.
> 
> Actually that's helpful in the initial material-gathering phase.
> Problematic aspects tend to be shoved down the hierarchy, where they are 
> then conveniently overlooked. Also, a hierarchical structure tends to be 
> used as a cheap excuse for not having a good structure within the pages.

Oh, I entirely agree. I much prefer non-hierarchical mechanisms for most 
data - often new relationships come along later. Imposing a hierarchy 
too early just creates lots of work.

> Later, when the texts are largely available, PmWiki's lack of hierarchy 
> support starts to hurt though.

Yes, in part, because it can't be done dynamically - that's not a 
criticism, btw, and who knows, someone might come up with a cunning 
method for a well-defined definition of the problem.

Lotus had a tool - years ago - that let you crate relationships between 
objects where the relationships could have attributes of their own. You 
could then query the objects and their relationships. It was an 
interesting model. You can cobble together the same in a RDBMS, of 
course, but the SQL soon gets messy.

-- 
Best,
Marc