COLLABORATIVE CHEMINFORMATICS APPLICATIONS - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 416

Figure 24.10 Blue Obelisk eXchange question-and-answer website is an open plat-

form where people can ask questions regarding the use of cheminformatics software
or ask for solutions to a problem they post.

Google Docs is a useful solution to the problem of collaborative editing of
traditional documents. Wikis provide another approach that is more free-form.
The fundamental idea of a wiki is that it is a collection of pages linked via
hyperlinks and authorized users can edit, add, to or delete these pages arbi-
trarily. Most wikis will also keep a history of the edits made to each page,
allowing one to track who did what and when.
Additionally, it is possible to add supplementary fi les to a wiki, which allows
one to record and track the entire state of a project over time (cf. the ONS
Solubility Challenge on Wikispaces [96]). While wikis are useful, they are not
necessarily the best solution for all cases. For example, in software develop-
ment projects, keeping an associated wiki up to date with the state of the
project can be tedious, especially if the development is very rapid. While the
wiki might be useful, for material such as tutorials and so on, it is rarely a good
solution for API documentation. Many would argue that even usage informa-
tion should be a part of the API documentation and should be written in line
with the code. Such inline documentation can easily be extracted and format-
ted using tools such as Doxygen [97] or Sphinx [98] and linked to from the
wiki. This last point highlights one advantage of a wiki type of system—it is a
very easy way to aggregate resources via linking rather than include them
directly in the wiki itself. This leads to signifi cantly lower efforts in maintaining
the wiki.