CogMap - A Visual Wiki

Please take a look at the CogMap experimental software at www.cogmap.com. CogMap has been described as an organizational chart Wiki, as it allows anyone to create and edit an organizational chart.

It is the brain-child of Brent Halliburton, who, coming from a background in sales, frequently had to go into sales meetings with no idea of the relationships and the resulting dynamics involved.

His idea was that any given person involved with an organization, while he or she would be unlikely to know its full structure, would likely know the relationship between at least two or three people in the organization. By building on the Wiki concept, people could come together on the Web site to put all of their pieces of the puzzle together to come up with a coherent picture of what an organization looks like that they, and others, could use as a resource.

It is built using AJAX for the front end of the application with the back end relying primarily on PHP. The organizational information is stored in a MySQL database. When a chart is retrieved, the organizational information is forwarded as XML to the front end, where its JavaScript rendering engine generates the org chart display.

For those interested, Brent encourages them to e-mail the company at CogMap@CogMap.com regarding licensing the code for use on their internal servers.

Personally, I think we should get this sort of visual Wiki built into the applications that we build for our customers – even if they do not ask for it. It could be a defining characteristic of any EDS-built application that it comes with a (visual) Wiki.