Orchestrating message buses and content platforms

One thing I have always wanted to do is have multiple properties that could be orchestrated from a central engine. I haven’t come close to doing it, but one reason I adopted Mindtouch Deki for my personal site was the possibility of using it to drive services and integrating into my other properties over time (some day). Today the folks at Mindtouch announced a new version which enhances that by adding a 2 way messaging bus. That gives me all kinds of ideas for my own stuff if I ever get to it. But there are other ideas to consider, and perhaps this is the kind of environment that you can use for a lot of research activities.

Lets say you are building a lab system that has multiple components, perhaps a poor man’s LIMS, Lab Notebook, etc. You can use Mindtouch as the central portal with changes being driven in two directions, so you can have an instrument update Mindtouch and vice versa. You can subscribe to a page and get email notifications as well, and a much better plugin interface. The interesting part of this update is that Mindtouch (and other similar platforms) are going beyond the traditional limits of a Wiki. For some tasks, classic Wiki functionality, I would still recommend Mediawiki, but if you want a platform for collaborative content management and orchestration, I think Mindtouch has made some great strides going beyond those constraints. I am looking forward to playing with the new version