A new name and domain

I’ve been internally struggling with the name OpenPKB since taking a renewed interest in this project last year. It was a convenient name at the time for a couple reasons: The group (previously described) originally took up this name as a simple designation to focus our efforts on developing an Open Personal Knowledgebase, and I thought it fitting (with permission) to continue with that name. And, more importantly in the Internet Age: the domain openpkb.org was available.

However, I had several problems with the name: First, I think project names with the word open in it look goofy* and is a waste of letters. Related to this point, the word open, to me, implies a contrast with a closed, or proprietary, version (Microsoft Office vs OpenOffice); since there is no dominate (or, I would argue, even good) PKB, there is no comparison to be made. Next, although the name clearly spells out the goal to create a personal knowledgebase, doing so actually constrains the future features in a way (e.g. sharing knowledge with others). Finally, it isn’t particularly memorable to those who aren’t already familiar with the not-so-common acronym PKB.

Although I can’t be certain that Lexiator will be the final name, I think that it has many advantages: the .org and .com domains were available, the name is short, the name should be fairly memorable in any language descended from Latin or Greek, and-most importantly-the name doesn’t really have a meaning attached to it currently, which both makes it easier to firmly link the project to the name, and opens up the possibilities for future features.

Relatedly, the advantage of using lexie for the “unit”, instead of note, is that hopefully it also has no immediate connotation when thinking or hearing about the software. There are several knowledge management tools that do not use the word “note”, and then there are others that are half-way decent knowledge management tools that have used the word “note”. The discussions around use of the latter are predominately the equivalent of throw-away physical paper, which I attribute to all of the baggage of the word, and probably both hamper the full usage of the tools and limit their growth (as the developers probably just get feedback that the users want a better notepad, and nothing more).

*OpenOffice.org being the worst offender—doubly so because they also put the domain TLD in the name! It has now been (thankfully) renamed and split into Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice.