Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
6En tmentofWSLMaps
By selecting the
“WSL deployment”
option of the
Tool
menu (see fig. 5),
the current map is turned into a wiki
installation in
MediaWiki
. This means
that around 400 LOC (mainly
SQL
statements) are automatically generated
for the current example. Figs. 6 and 7
provides three screenshots of the gener-
ated pages: the main page (illustrating
the use of the
CategoryTree
and
Calen-
dar
extensions), the
“Purchase rejection
Test”
article page (which is obtained
from a
Word XML
document) and the
“Purchase Rejection UC”
(which follows
the
“UseCaseTemplate”
also externally
obtained). Space limitations prevent us
from giving a detail account of this
generation process. For the purpose of
this paper, it is enough to show the
mapping between
FreeMind
constructs
and
MediaWiki
primitives. The last
two columns in Table 1 indicates such
mappings.
It is important to notice that some
scaffolding features require additional
MediaWiki
extensions (e.g.,
Category-
Tree
). The
WSL
engine builds upon
MediaWiki
version 1.16 and the exten-
sions have been tested against it. Such
composition is provided as a unit by
WSL
. This raises the issue of platform
evolution, i.e., new versions of
MediaWiki
(or its extensions) might impact the
WSL
engine. This is certainly true. But, how real is this threat? First,
MediaWiki
is a stable platform backed by thousands of installations. And second, wikis can
be upgraded once deployed. That is,
WSL
can be used to generate the wiki
scaffold, and next, the user can upgrade to the newest version (just two clicks
away). This makes us confident about the lifespan of
WSL
.
Fig. 6.
“Purchase Project”
wiki main
page as generated by
WSL
7 Discussion through Related Work
Mindmaps have long been recognized as a useful technique for brainstorming.
Recently, enhancements have been proposed to improve the ecacy of mind
maps (e.g., use of pictorial stimuli [14]). Although benefits are reported, these
extensions decrease simplicity, and jeopardize interoperability. There certainly
