The group's chief technology officer David Boloker demonstrated how IBM is combining these technologies to build Web-based business applications. "A wiki is about publishing information, [then] we started to see application models on wikis and new types of wiki commands and now we have gone a step further," Boloker said.

The team has created an application on top of a wiki using an imaginary hardware company as an example. The chain has four stores in different geographies across the US and the wiki is used to integrate mapping, weather, and ERP information to the extent of seeing how stores in the colder states are selling more heaters than those in warmer areas. Supply chain systems can therefore act upon any likely product shortage.

The wiki supports drag-and-drop so a store in the list can be dragged onto a frame housing a live Google Maps feed and a query will be lodged automatically returning the location of the store.

"Click on the store to get a list of hot items which could be from an RSS feed or backend SAP system," Boloker said. "Systems can be automated with Web services or triggered off by a rain warning event to send more pumps to a nearby store."

The wiki uses free data and marries it with enterprise systems on the back-end. Built with open source tools including PHP and the Rico AJAX toolkit, the wiki is updated with a Web-based rich text editor which IBM built from scratch and could be used for online word processing.