Project Overview: Meset is a web-based message board application that logically organizes discussions according to a set model rather than the traditional forum (flat) and threaded (newsgroup) models. In the set model, sets are the main construct for organizing user messages. Discussions may be categorized naturally in multiple ways, browsing or searching can be performed using set operations, and the data may be mapped onto multiple selectable views that are combinations of flat lists and tree structures. The set model is argued to be more flexible than the other models yet still more intuitive that the threaded model. A prototype is under development, and this is planned for eventual implementation on the Math Message Board at Math2.org (http://math2.org/mmb). See the paper for more information.
Note on using the prototype: Please test out the software. This instance of the software is linked to a test database, so if you really mess up the data, it won't really matter. The data can be quickly restored from a backup. Just to make this more realistic, a full copy of the MMB messages is included. Any changes will not affect the production instance of MMB, so feel free to try moving threads around. Warning: any posting here may get deleted, especially if the data needs to be restored from backup. Therefore, I wouldn't use this prototype instance for posting really interesting mathematical discussions (use the production instance of MMB for that instead).
Download:
Note: the distribution currently only contains the low-level database access code. It does not contain the GUI code since that is still very experimental.
Meset requires SQL-Interpolate.
The design and development currently are largely being handled by Mark Tiefenbruck, David Manura, Pierre Lecomte, and others on MMB.