The Sikoba story

The concept of Sikoba stems from a concrete, real-life need of a knowledge base application that would be really simple and convenient to use.

With most existing knowledge management products, adding information is time-consuming, which limits casual use and prevents these systems to be truly practical. Usually, data structures have to be created and managed before information can be added. When adding information, the correct position of that information item or document has to be determined. Finally, multiple “features” make such systems powerful but difficult to use casually.

Sikoba completely eliminates the effort of structuring data and of determining where data should be placed within the knowledge base. The basic philosphy is:

• Just dump your data into Sikoba and forget about it.
• Sikoba will make sure you will find it when needed.

In order to achieve this simplicity, Sikoba needs powerful capabilities to search, analyze and organize data. This constitutes the major software development challenge.

Technology

Sikoba has been written in Java/JSP and uses NaX Base, a native XML database. NaX Base has been chosen because it allows for extremely fast searching of large data sets. Complex searches through gigabytes of data yield results in seconds.

Sikoba users

Sikoba's target market are companies and workgroups of any size.

Sikoba can be used as the knowledge base for an entire organisation, or as the ad hoc knowledge repository of a specific projet. The service is browser-based and compatible with all modern browsers. No software installation is necessary. As Sikoba is a hosted service, it can be up and running very quickly.