The bliss interface looks a little like excel at first, but bliss is not quite a spreadsheet – though it does share some key features in common with spreadsheets (notably cells).  The interface is also not unlike a word processor, this is by design, word processors are easy to use.  The bliss interface is also somewhat like a database, it’s possible to create sets of data and reference those sets from other places – i.e. database lookups, however bliss is not a database.  Finally Bliss is rather like a Wiki.  A way to stored linked and related information.

Technically speaking, bliss is a piece of software for maintaining graphs and sets of data.  Although this might seem like quite an esoteric piece of software of interest to only engineers and scientists, it’s really a new framework for storing related information.  That information can be anything you might be interested in from software development artifacts, to business and customer information.

Bliss allows you to maintain information about your dataset, so that your data becomes self documenting.  This kind of information is known as meta data,  It’s therefore possible (and intentional) that you can, say, maintain a list of customers in one dataset and create a linked contact history in another dataset.  

Bliss allows you to associated related data together by linking.  Links can be enforced where necessary, or can be ad-hoc links for documentation purposes where the fact of the link doesn’t constrain the data.

Inside the Bliss interface, data is stored in cells – much like in a spreadsheet.  Each cell’s format default’s to text, but can be constrained to a specific kind of data (per column) if desired.  E.g. forcing a date, a number, a boolean (checkbox), a tagset.

All cells live individually in the Bliss Repository.  Cells can be grouped together into documents.  Documents are collections of cells.  Each cell can be inside the Bliss Repository and inside as many documents as is desired.  It’s possible to have a cell as read-only in one document and editable in another document.

 

A document can also be considered to be a cell, it’s possible to link from a cell to a document as easily as it is to link from a cell to a cell.

A document can be “inserted” with a link.  This kind of link typically embeds a read-only version of the document inside another document.  When you’re writing output that provides a narrative about your dataset, this is a useful way to “pull” your data together.

Where it’s useful, a whole row can be treated as a “Record”, that is the cells are treated together as a single entity.  The “Record” is then no different from a single cell in that it can be added to documents.  A record is really just a very small kind of document.  A document is just a collection of cells.  When dealing with records it’s easy to see how Bliss can be treated like a database.

 

A whole manuscript of text could be stored in a single cell if that was the desired use, in this case a cell could be considered to be a document as you might understand the term from a word processor.  

Smart documents can be created to automatcially gather cells that match the search critera.

Bliss version controls everything that is put into it, it will automatically maintain undo history for each cell.  If you choose to “Publish” a document, then that document is version controlled too.

The watchword for Bliss is ad-hoc.  It can be tightened down and constrained completely, cell by cell, but the whole idea is that you model your process by doing the process and tweak the system as you see fit.

Templates are the important thing in Bliss.  Once you get to grips with the interface (which won’t take long, it’s really simple), the next thing to do is define the kinds of documents that you want to create with Bliss.  You can save empty documents as Templates.  These templates will then have all the desired rules and constraints in place before you begin.  Imagine you want to start a Prince project, download the Prince templates (or create your own).  Imagine that you want to use the Babok methods for Business Analysis, download the Babok templates.  The real benefit with templates is in the fact that the specification work has been completed already, all you need to do is get to work.