Hybrid Wikis: Empowering Users to Collaboratively Structure Information

Wikis are increasingly used for collaborative enterprise information management since they are flexibly applicable and encourage the contribution of knowledge. The fact that ordinary wiki pages contain pure text only limits how the information can be processed or made accessible to users. Semantic wikis promise to solve this problem by capturing knowledge in structured form and offering advanced querying capabilites. However, it is not obvious for business users, how they can benefit from providing semantic annotations which are not familiar to them and often difficult to enter. In this paper, we first introduce the concepts of hybrid wikis, namely attributes, type tags, attribute suggestions, and attribute definitions with integrity constraints. Business users interact with these concepts using a familiar user interface based on forms, spreadsheet-like tables, and auto-completion for links and values. We then illustrate these concepts using an example scenario with projects and persons and highlight key implementation aspects of a Java-based hybrid wiki system (Tricia). The paper ends with the description of practical experiences gained in two usage scenarios, a comparison with related work and an outlook on future work. 1 Motivation and Problem Statement To keep pace with the growing amount of digital information that has to be managed, enterprises have to adopt new tools and methods (Edmunds and Morris, 2000). In the recent past, wikis are increasingly used as lightweight shared knowledge repositories that allow to collaboratively gather and consolidate information that was previously scattered across emails, files on personal computers and paper documents (Stocker and Tochtermann, 2009). Having this information integrated in a central place, being able to search it and to connect related pieces of information with hyperlinks is in fact a major advance. However, with a growing knowledge base soon the demand arises to access information in more structured ways that classical wikis do not support. For example it is not possible to query a wiki for a company’s research projects that started in the year 2010 or to export data about these project to a spreadsheet. So even if only rudimentary structured querying functionality is required, the enterprises have to resort to separate applications, usually specialized to manage information of particular domains (like employees, projects or customers) or they have to develop customized solutions. In both cases the advantages of storing information in a central repository are lost. Technically, semantic wikis are promising tools to tackle this problem. They allow to combine the textual content with structured data. Typically, users have to provide this data in the form of semantic annotations to wiki pages or parts thereof. The structured part of the information in the wiki can then be queried similar to the contents of a database. However, in practice they are rarely used as a general purpose tool that dynamically adapts to new needs. In contrast semantic wikis often are pre-configured by experts to solve rather specific problems. Although, from a theoretical point of view, they can be used to structure arbitrary information, there are several barriers users are facing when editing content: • usually, a special syntax has to be used to add semantic annotations which makes it difficult and cumbersome to edit structured content • the modelling concepts are not familiar to the users • it is not obvious for users how they can benefit from providing semantic annotations This paper describes a novel approach to mitigate these problems. In Section 2, our approach of so-called hybrid wikis is presented and illustrated using an example scenario. The term ‘hybrid’ expresses that a subset of the features of semantic wikis are integrated into classic wiki software. The main modelling concepts are described and the limitations of the approach are discussed. Important and interesting technical aspects of the implementation are covered in Section 3. Section 4 contains two case studies demonstrating the practicability of the approach. In section 5, we give an overview of related work and highlight some examples of semantic wikis that use different approaches to facilitate data entry. The paper concludes with a short summary and an outlook on further research and planned improvements of the prototype.