Rhizome was written with two goals in mind: one, a sample application to demonstrate and experiment with Rx4RDF technologies. Two, a personal tool to allow me to take notes in a wide variety of contexts -- plain text files, blog entries, comments in source code, MS Word/Open Office documents, etc -- and keep an archive that keeps track of locations and can automatically (based on metadata rules) republish the content in a variety of formats: e.g. assemble the notes into the outline of a formal document in DocBook, or as a collection of interlinked pages on a Wiki-like website.

But Rhizome could evolve into much more.

Here are some directions Rhizome could evolve:

• Short term: Most obviously, turn Rhizome into a polished, production-ready Wiki-like web application.
  Todo:
• Improve Raccoon performance and robustness: pretty much done, see RaccoonStatus
• Improve the scalability of the RxPath engine (right now I wouldn't run a Rhizome site with more than a few hundred pages)
• Add a bunch of little Wiki features and configuration options. Pretty much done, Rhizome now has all the features you'd expect in a Wiki except for:
• Show Page References, Orphaned pages
• Subscribe to page change notifications (and better RSS support)
• Medium term: an application that combines the best of discussion lists, blogs, and wikis. Think of it as an message forum where forums are trees with leaves that are "permathreads" and you can subscribe to any branch. Quoting is fine grained, and replies can be typed, e.g. "question", "factual correction", "opinion", allowing each leaf can be treated and viewed as a collaborative wiki entry.
  Todo:
• Support for "shredding" XML documents into RDF statements
• Support for RDF contexts and views
• Lot's more UI
• Long term: Rhizomes' intertwine forming a P2P infrastructure. Content is distributed among nodes in a semantic web cloud of RDF, allowing the management and hosting costs of running a node to be negliable. End-users run nodes that act like news aggregators and their choices feedback into the system. See the Rhizome Position Paper.
  Todo:
• Integrate with a P2P routing infrastructure
• Collaborative filtering, web of trust