DC 2010 Artist paper

DC 2010
This article would be submited to DC 2010 Conference

Title

Metadata for semantic wikis networks

Abstract

bla bla bla

Authors

Jacques Ducloy, Thierry Daunois, Muriel Foulonneau, Alice Hermann, Jean-Charles Lamirel, Stéphane Sire and Christine Vanoirbeek.

Introduction

Since 1994, when Ward Cunningham launched WikiWikiWeb devoted to software development, wikis are playing an increasing role in the landscape of scientific and technical information. With Wikipedia, size reaches millions of records and the need for metadata becomes ubiquitous. The first generation of metadata is based mainly on the use of categories, which looks like a traditional indexing practice. The semantic wikis introduce a new generation of metadata that allows a knowledge modelling in a RDF framework.

Most of wiki applications are quite monolithic and the metadata and metadata perform an internal function. What happens with an editorial collection of scientific information distributed in a network of semantic wikis? This article would like to identify several metadata issues that we met while starting the Wicri network.

WICRI is an acronym that stands for "WIkis for Communities in Research and Innovation". Right now, Wicri is a demonstrator, which contains only fifty wikis, in a regional level, with a few set of topics. But the knowledge architecture we must design is quite the same as would be required for several thousand wikis. Thus metadata do play a crucial role in this project.

In this paper, we will first introduce Wicri network; then we will review several existing solutions. Trails to explore in the future will be discussed in two views: that of a contributor who is facing the production of metadata, and that of the computer scientist who develops new services.

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 often 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. For wikis related with scientific working groups we use in first part a code identifying the global thematic; for instance, Ist/Artist is the wiki of Artist WG, dealing with Information Science and Technology.
• Common wikis are design by the global Wicri Community. They can be managed by an organization but they fully share the common rules and would be moderated by independent and scientific committees. In this paper we use a naming scheme with Wicri as first part, like in Wicri/Lorraine or Wicri/Water.

In a multilingual approach, most wikis are really families of wikis (i.e. a set of wikis, one for each language, connected by interwiki links). In this paper, we use the notation Wicri/Water(fr) to define the French component of the family.

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 CRIS (Current Research Information System). This approach looks like Jeffery's [ ] or Erbach's [ ] one. They would like to merge organization releted items (CRIS) with open archives in order to produce an eScience infrastructure. Wicri adds a wiki, with its editorial facilities, for bringing 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 and contains 4 wiki families: 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.

The current Wicri network (a subset)

Network coherency versus contenus différenciés

Ce paragraphe demande un petit travail sur le wiki pour obtenir de bons exemples lisibles par un lecteur anglais... On doit faire apparaître plusieurs cas de figures

• contenus très différents : exemple Pittsburgh
• contenus identiques sur la partie texte : l'article de Carl Loagoze sur Artist et Wicri
• Puis la page sur Carl Lagoze dans Artist / Ticri et Wicri

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 geographic 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. These 3 pages are related to the same topic, but are getting distinct contents.

In some cases, we have quite the same contents. For instance the same article, such as a translation we made about a Carl Lagose's paper, could appear in several wikis, with the same original text but with several tiny differences.

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

Ce paragraphe doit permettre de dégager 5 modes de replication :

• niveau wiki qui peuvent être distribuées en pair à pair (exemple le pool pour des raisons de sécurité)
• niveau pages qui sont dupliquées sur le réseau
• niveau paragraphe qui sont dupliqués à l'identique
• niveau paragraphe qui sont dupliqués avec transformation
• niveau graphe de pages qui sont dupliqués avec condition

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)

Xml handling

• quelques références sur le sujet - en s'appuyant notamment sur le contrôle des replications, la cohabitation d'informations structurées et non structurée, les objets scientifiques complexes

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 for designing metadata items, its content and its organization.

Introducing Wicri/metadata

• On précise le besoin : métadonnées à portée générique, (au moins dans un premier temps) pour permettre à un contributeur d'élaborer un nouvel élément de métadonnée

Metadata sources

• On donne les principales sources sur lesquelles s'appuyer

Main sources of metadata:

• DCMI
• CRIS: The skeleton of Wicri is a Current Research Information System
• generic semantic systems dealing with research : for example Openresearch.org
• bibliographic formats, mainly those that operate in a multilingual context (for instance Unimarc)
• Text formatting????: TEI...

• remarque: on doit introduire le multilinguisme en amont de l'article

Metadata for Wicri/metadata

• On donne des premières informations sur l'organisation des données sur le wiki, toujours vu du contributeur
• on fait une liaison avec la section suivante sur les aspects informatiques

Metadata for computers

On veut utiliser les métadonnées pour ouvrir de nouvelles facilités

Handling network coherency

2 points :

• cohérence du réseau
• étendre les fonctionnalités disponibles au niveau wiki vers le résaeu - mais je ne suis pas certain qu'il y ait beaucoup de métadonnées sur ce pointJacques Ducloy 08:55, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Man machine interface for contributors

Un paragraphe -> EPFL

External web mining

Un paragraphe -> Loria

Discussion & conclusion

:-)les métadonnées c'est important !!!

Plus sérieusement, on peut développer quelque chose autour de plus on s'y prend tôt, mieux c'est... (alors le wiki permet de différer...)

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>