You know how everybody is all excited about Big Data these days? Huge, complex systems to process billions of records in an enterprise environment? Yeah, this isn't that.
The Querki Project can best be thought of as the beginning of the Small Data revolution. It's a very new and different sort of database/website, designed specifically for tiny, easy data-centric problems -- the sort of problems that ordinary people actually have day-to-day. This is anything from shopping lists to personal inventories to club organization to cookbooks: problems that are typically messy, poorly structured, fluid, evolving, involving small amounts of data, but nonetheless do have relevant structure.
These tend to get ignored by the engineering community, because each problem seems so simple -- they're the sort of things that a competent programmer could toss off in Rails in less than a day. But why would I want to spend a day on a problem like that? I should be able to set it up in minutes.
Or to put it another way: Querki is to Rails essentially as a wiki is to a static website. It's not as powerful as Rails, but it's a heck of a lot easier and quicker to use for the sorts of problems it can deal with. It focuses on ease of use for everyday users, rather than power for the programmers.
(Which isn't to say that it doesn't have power -- Querki's object-oriented data model makes a lot of messy problems much easier than a traditional RDBMS. But it is currently aimed at data sets of hundreds or thousands of records, not millions.)
For more information, see the Querki Documentation Space: http://www.querki.net/help/ -- in particular, the Querki Quickstart or Learning Querki -- or contact me directly at [email protected]
Querki by Querki Inc is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Note that, while Querki itself is somewhat restricted, we are gradually lifting a few libraries out of it, and releasing those under the MIT license for general use. See the list of Querki Open-Source Projects in the Querki documentation.