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Title

Metadata for semantic wikis networks

Abstract

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Introducing Wicri

Wicri, a network of wikis for research and innovation

Wicri network has been created in the framework of Mission Ticri (Technologies dealing with Information and Communication for Communities involved in Research and Innovation). This initiative was launched by the Lorraine representative of Ministry in charge of research and innovation affairs. Ticri aims at disseminating main results of research communities in order to promote partnership between innovation actors, to encourage outreach, and to develop technology transfers in a multidisciplinary context.

Wikipedia has demonstrated the interest of the wiki approach to build and disseminate a common knowledge in a very large scale. Thus Wikipedia brings us a first answer (and we are using this media) but it is not sufficient to bring us a global response. A main point is that Wikipedia's contributors must produce information that is attested by references. Authors can be anonymous as far as their bibliographic references are significant and links to explicitly named people. But now, when we deals with research fields, the academic communities is making the knowledge that Wikipedia could use. In many cases, knowledge is in progress and many assumptions appear to be hypothesis. For these reasons we think that the authors must be clearly known; thus anonymous contributions are forbidden.

As a result, such a wiki infrastructure must be driven by institutionnal entities in order to manage registration processes. Thus the institutions must find an advantage in investing in wiki approach and visibility becomes a strong parameter. The network approach allows each partner to promote its own wiki site, and its own visibility.

In a first step, we have build a little demonstrator with several institutional wikis. The limits have appeared quite immediatly: if several organizations are working on the same topic, this topic must be developped on a thematic wiki. Thus we have quickly introduce several wikis on thematic or regional design.

The demonstrator was operated by a little team, mainly 3 people, in the same office. As soon as we were more than one, we have met quite immediatly several coherency problems and introduced a an effective carrying of metadata.

The current Wicri network

The wiki network accepts two main types of wikis.

• Institutional wikis are handled by an organization. In this paper we will use a naming scheme with two parts : region then sigle. For instance Lorraine/sge for the research cluster SGE (Science et Génie de l'Environnement) in Lorraine area.
• Common wikis are design by the global Wicri Community. They can be managed by an organization but they fully share the common rules and are moderared by independant and scientific committes. In this paper we use a naming scheme with Wicri as first part, like in Wicri/Lorraine.

A first set of common wikis are designed on a regional framework such as Wicri/Lorraine or Wicri/Alsace. A main objective is to obtain a highly detailed and understandable Current Research Information System. This approach looks like Jeffery's [ ] or Erbach's [ ] one in which the wiki, with its editorail facilities, brings a readable summary.

An other set of common wikis is devoted to thematic fields. At this time, one of them, Wicri/Ticri is related to Information Science & Technology (a DCMI portal is included). An other part deals with environment : Wicri/Water, Wicri/Woods, Wicri/Biomass and Wicri/UrbanSoils. They are also organized with information system items, (such as program committies) and editorial contents (scientific articles, scientific surveys).

A fews wikis have been designed for a global coherency of the network. The most visible is Wicri/Wicri which gives a global view of the network: all topics must appear and link to more detailed pages or desk in other wikis.

An other, Wicri/Media is an image repository (and plays the same role than Commons in the Wipedia family). It also contains pdf documents, but we are studying a better solution, using Fedora for instance.

At least, related to metadata handling, a wiki named Wicri/Base contains templates and semantic items whch are used in all other wikis.

Network coherency versus contenus différenciés

A given information will be processed on different wikis. For instance the city of Pittsburgh appear at least on 3 wikis. On Wicri/Ticri, Pittsburgh is directly connected to DC 2010 and the corresponding page speaks about main activities related to information science in this area. On Wicri/Water, we describe the confluence of Allegheny and Monongahela rivers for giving the source of Ohio. On Wicri/Wicri, we talk about general facts about this city and introduced commented links on the other pages.

Issues about networks of semantic wikis

In this section we will introduce a discussion about what technical choices have been done in the design of Wicri.

Semantic wikis for scientific objects

The Wicri project is not a research one, but a demontrator which must become an operational set of services. In a first step, to be fully compatible with Wikipedia seems to be a pragmatic option. So, we have choosen to start with MediaWiki. This CMS is used by Wikipedia and is becoming very popular.

For handling scientific data, MediaWiki (with its basic donwloaded version) appears quite poor. But it provides two mechanisms (php extensions and templates) which are very useful for science related developments. For instance, a basic exension such as image map is currently used for

It supports many extensions for carrying scientific data (for instance LaTeX) and for semantic purposes.

references scientific objects using MediaWiki

• 3D bio... Proteopedia Eran Hodis, Jaime Prilusky, Eric Martz, Israel Silman, John Moult and Joel L. Sussman: Proteopedia - a scientific 'wiki' bridging the rift between 3D structure and function of biomacromolecules, Genome Biology 2008, 9:R121 doi:10.1186/gb-2008-9-8-r121
  • http://proteopedia.org/wiki/index.php

references semantic using MediaWiki

• BOwiki Robert Hoehndorf1, Joshua Bacher, Michael Backhaus, Sergio E Gregorio, Frank Loebe, Kay Prüfer, Alexandr Uciteli, Johann Visagie, Heinrich Herre1, and Janet Kelso / BMC Bioinformatics 2009, 10(Suppl 5):S5doi:10.1186/1471-2105-10-S5-S5
  • http://bowiki.net/wiki/index.php/Main_page

references scientific objects running with other wiki engines

• Christoph Lange. SWiM – a semantic wiki for mathematical knowledge management. In Sean Bechhofer, Manfred Hauswirth, J¨org Hoffmann, and Manolis Koubarakis, editors, ESWC, volume 5021 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 832–837. Springer, 2008.
  • http://wiki.openmath.org/

peer-to-peer

Samples :

• peer-to-peer networks
• DCMI set of wikis

Metadata for contributors

In most content management systems designed "before blogs and wikis" a clear barrier exists between editing contents, programming and managing metadata. On a wiki, all these activities can be handled by any actors, on any page, at any time.

References

• Gregor Erbach - Data-centric view in e-Science information systems. Data Science Journal Vol. 5 (2006) pp.219-222
  < http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/dsj/5/0/219/_pdf >
• Keith G. Jeffery - Technical Infrastructure and Policy Framework for Maximising the Benefits from Research Output in:ELPUB2007. Openness in Digital Publishing: Awareness, Discovery and Access - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Electronic Publishing held in Vienna, Austria 13-15 June 2007 / Edited by: Leslie Chan and Bob Martens. ISBN 978-3-85437-292-9, 2007, pp. 1-12
  < http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.102.5044&rep=rep1&type=pdf>