The ability to edit a page in-place often makes people assume that AllAbout is a Wiki, or is wiki-derived. This is not correct. AllAbout's engine uses a variety of new and old techniques and technologies that make it more useful and versatile than a wiki. The architecture and design of the AllAbout engine is based on research done over the course of a decade.
For the purposes of this paper, I will call the AllAbout engine "Nexi" which is a convenient handle (and one to which I own the .com domain, although that's not particularly important). Nexi is a way of organizing information and the relationships between pieces of information.
Before discussing the Nexi technology in detail, I want to briefly discuss other techniques for organizing information online that have been used.
Most small sites use basic html href hyperlinks to join pages together. Pages are linked individually, as the site needs. There is no overall organizational technique other than that required to string the pages together.
Larger sites often store data in databases, with one record in a database table being one page. Each table is a set of pages of a certain type, for example "books". Some database sites only have one table, others have many for each different sort of page.
The style used by most reference sites, where a term is the distinguishing key between pages. Pages refer to each other by the dictionary term. Wikipedia is the classic dictionary relationship site.
Pages are linked together by "parent to child" or similar relationships, with the links between pages determining how the site is organized.
more to come.