Hybrid Wikis

Enterprise Collaboration and Information Management

News

20th of July 2011: The article Hybrid Wikis: Empowering Users to Collaboratively Structure Information was selected as the best paper at the International Conference on Software and Data Management 2011 (ICSOFT 2011), Sevilla, Spain.

Objective

Hybrid Wikis provide a lightweight semantic extension to the collaboration platform Tricia   which comprises a traditional wiki as a core component. In contrast to more heavyweight approaches as semantic wikis, the Hybrid Wiki approach does not focus on annotating wiki content with semantic information corresponding to a fixed ontology, which could be regarded as a top-down (i.e., ontology first) approach. In contrast, it allows a kind of ontology or datamodel to emerge from the content by enabling users to easily add structured content to any wiki page in the form of arbitrary named attributes or tags. Guidance is provided by suggesting terms that are frequently used by other users and the ability to derive new pages from existing ones. This bottom-up approach is complemented with the ability to establish certain constraints such as mandatory attributes or inheritance relationships between types. By applying these to stable parts of the schema that emerged over time further processing of the structured content - for example the generation of visualizations - becomes possible