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A DSL for Corporate Wiki Initialization
Oscar Díaz and Gorka Puente
Onekin Research Group, University of the Basque Country, Spain
{oscar.diaz,gorka.puente}@ehu.es
Abstract. Some wikis support virtual communities that are built
around the wiki itself (e.g.,
Wikipedia
). By contrast, corporate wikis
are not created in a vacuum since the community already exists.
Documentation, organigrams, etc are all there by the time the wiki
is created. The wiki should then be tuned to the existing information
ecosystem. That is, wiki concerns (e.g., categories, permissions) are to be
influenced by the corporate settings. So far, “all wikis are created equal”:
empty. This paper advocates for corporate wikis to be initialized with a
“wiki scaffolding”: a wiki installation where some categories, permissions,
etc, are initialized to mimic the corporate settings. Such scaffolding is
specified in terms of a Domain Specific Language (
DSL
). The DSL engine
is then able to turn the DSL expression into a
MediaWiki
installation
which is ready to be populated but now, along the company settings.
The DSL is provided as a
FreeMind
plugin, and DSL expressions are
denoted as mindmaps.
Keywords: wiki,dsl,MDE,informationsystem.
1
Introduction
Wiki's pioneer, Ward Cunningham, defines wikis as "the simplest online database
that could possibly work”[4]. Nowadays, wikis are becoming a favourite approach
for collaborative knowledge formation and knowledge sharing [12]. So far, most
studies are conducted for public-access wikis or wikis for supporting learning
activities [13]. However, companies are increasingly realizing the benefits of wikis
[3]. Indeed, the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey reports that around 47% of the
respondent companies were somehow using wikis [10]. Based on these figures,
we can expect an increasing adoption of wikis among companies.
As any other Information System, the interplay of technology, work practice,
and organization is paramount to achieve successful wiki deployments. Therefore,
we can expect differences when wikis are deployed to sustain open communities
(e.g.,
Wikipedia
), offered within a learning organization [13] or are deployed at
a company [8]. The peculiarities of each organization will certainly percolate
the wiki itself. Indeed, unlike other settings, companies provide an existing
infrastructure that frames the wiki. Users, roles, permissions, terminology,
documents, templates or project milestones are already therebeforethewikiis
created. This is not the case (or at least not to the same extent) in open-access
wikis (e.g.,
Wikipedia
) where the community originates around the wiki itself.
