Accidental wealth: liberating information with Foswiki
Channel: Linux.conf.au 2011 -- Brisbane, Australia
Date: 2014-11-23

Presenter(s): Paul Harvey
URL: http://2011.linux.conf.au/programme/schedule/view_talk/209

The TRIN Taxon Profile Toolkit is a wiki-based tool allowing content authors to easily create sets of structured documents that may be re-used and mapped onto different, larger datasets. Content authors use a guided work-flow to define structure (known as profile templates) and meaning (known as definitions). Because the toolkit is implemented as a wiki application, authors may drive not only the evolution of their content, but also the structures (loosely equivalent to database schemas), definitions and report pages.

In this approach, a starting point appropriate for species profile pages is provided. With training and support given as required, we believe rigid, one-off database applications might be avoided and instead solve many data entry, delivery and re-use problems by leveraging a common wiki application framework.

As users develop their content, a specialist knowledge engineer may perform mappings from the original content onto standard (presently XML and RDF-based) data formats. A mapped document set may then be pushed to curated databases, made available to search aggregators, be imported into other applications or become re-purposed in interesting ways.

Foswiki (http://foswiki.org/About) is the fork of open-source perl project TWiki (http://twiki.org). We also considered Drupal, X-Wiki, Semantic Mediawiki and Google Wave, among others.

Foswiki's strength is the ability to develop wiki applications in ordinary topic pages - without writing any custom plugin code - using an extensible, powerful macro language. Combined with its DataForms features - a data storage model along the lines of the "NoSQL" theme - Foswiki makes for a compelling rapid development platform for many data entry and reporting tasks.

In this presentation, we will also cover how an existing product such as Foswiki can bring many advantages over a purpose-built, in-house solution:
    * Democratic, merit-based development and release processes are already well established
    * Standard wiki features - versioning, plugins, authorisation, security and hierarchical access controls are free
    * Existing developer communities producing hundreds of plugins and squashing thousands of bugs so that you don't have to

Apart from showing the Taxon Profile Toolkit and some live data created with it, there will be a practical demonstration of linked data (semantic web) technology providing stable identifiers on wiki pages as a means for enabling robust information interchange if time permits.

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