DC 2010 Artist paper

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Title

Metadata for semantic wikis networks

Abstract

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Introduction

Note

This article is written while using a collaborative practice. It will be published in two versions: traditional on the web site of the conference; and wicrified on Artist wiki.

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 link to explicitly named people. But now, when we deal 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 institutional 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 built a little demonstrator with several institutional wikis. The limits have appeared quite immediately: if several organizations are working on the same topic, this topic must be developped on a thematic wiki. Thus we have quickly introduced several wikis on thematic or regional design.

A little team, mainly 3 people in the same office, has operated the demonstrator. As soon as we were more than one, we have met 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 accronym. For instance Lorraine/sge stands 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 moderated by independent and scientific committees. In this paper we use a naming scheme with Wicri as first part, like in Wicri/Lorraine.

CRIS on wiki

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 aims at setting up an operational set of services. At the present time, it is a demonstrator which is becoming a digital infrastructure. So, even if we are close to research projets, we have implement some pragmatic solutions. For instance we have chosen to be fully compatible with Wikipedia. So, we have decided to use MediaWiki as the wiki engine of Wicri network. This CMS is used by Wikipedia and is becoming very popular.

We would like that a Wikipedia contributor find a very similar environnement in Wicri. A basic downloading of MediaWiki is not sufficient, as soon as a user would like to handle scientific objects. So we have begun to install a set of php extensions and templates. Some of them are very easy to install, for instance "imagemap".

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/

Networks and Distributed Wiki Applications

Samples :

• peer-to-peer networks
  • Charbel Rahhal, Hala Skaf-Molli, Pascal Molli, and Stéphane Weiss: Multi-synchronous Collaborative Semantic Wikis. In Wise'09: International Conference on Web Information Systems , 2009.
    < http://www.loria.fr/~molli/pmwiki/uploads/Main/Skaf09wise.pdf >
• DCMI set of wikis
  • Fredrik Enoksson: A MoinMoin Wiki Syntax for Description Set Profiles, DCMI Working draft,(2008)
    < http://dublincore.org/documents/2008/10/06/dsp-wiki-syntax/ >

See also: several intesting papers about SemWiki 2009 on Ticri (en)

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. Quite any contributor may be faced with having to create new metadata. We have to give him a strong environnement to explore, define and comment such an activity.

This section introduces the need of a new wiki, its content and its organization.

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>