The Magic of Small Databases

I love this idea of small databases. I've published this kind of thing on my own website for decades. Thanks to the amazing Wayback Machine at Internet Archive you can see my list of laserdiscs and even my list of CDs from 1992! Even today, one of my main website categories is Lists where I continue to curate things like list of escape rooms, list of vehicles I've owned, even cameras I've had. These are all small databases.

Let’s think through the kinds of use cases and functionality that is important. I’d say that the core features are:

1. Creating collections of objects
2. Adding and updating metadata for the objects (ideally in bulk if needed)
3. Creating collections, relationships and pathways through the data
4. Collaborating on these with others
5. Publishing to the web in an easy to consume way, with stable URLs, search etc
6. Open standard file formats for export / import / desktop editing

I think the last point is key to building an ecosystem of this stuff. We have CSV files as a kind of open standard for any kind of data - possible to open it in all kinds of applications (or even edit directly with a text editor) and yet we have no standard concept for a database file that you can just open and edit in a range of applications?

As I read this I the screaming remnants of the Semantic Web and Microformats kept ringing in my head. There was a serious push to support semantic metadata to allow any webpage to have this kind of structure. I went deep down the Semantic MediaWiki track which brought the world of wiki editing to that same idea. Semantic MediaWiki is probably the closest realization of what this article asks for. But it was massively too difficult.

At the root of all this I feel is that you're dealing with a database. As long as that is the metaphor, I think we will struggle with a domain that is too complex. So how do we make the data available in a way that those databases can be completely ephemeral? Microformats seems like the right answer. What is a data version of the web? And how does it interoperate seamlessly with everything else.