Sun Microsystems is known as an advocate of open systems and a major contributor to open source software, providing a diversity of software, systems, services, and microelectronics. As the vast majority of software created by Sun Microsystems is developed in an open source manner, an enormous pressure rests on building and maintaining various communities of practice and interest, spanning over the actual corporate boundaries.

Knowledge management in such communities is a challenge, solvable by the effective utilization of a traditional wiki model, in combination with the latest advancements in the web development (social networking, Semantic Web). Sun has already put great effort into the deployment and utilization of various wiki systems allowing various open communities to effectively create, share and collaborate.

NetBeans as a product is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), with a history spanning over more than 10 years of continuous development. Development of the NetBeans IDE is a relatively complex process, involving many acting parties, various types of knowledge and different roles of participants (Figure 1).

The complexity of the current development process is further enhanced by the rich array of different  knowledge management and document storage systems used by the developers. These encompass classical Wiki systems, Bug-tracking systems, FTP repositories, versioning systems, e-mail repositories and many other types of systems.

The KiWi project will provide the means to integrate the information that is currently housed in many heterogeneous data sources, thereby increasing efficiency of the development process and  overall organisation at the NetBeans development group at Sun Microsystems.

Next article in this section:

A Public KiWi Showcase: Photo Stories