Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
through multiple layers of access rights. It allows users to focus on what
should be easily shared and keep sensitive material in places where they
are already secured. From a more practical point of view, KnowIt acts as
a directory of 'where is what' instead of trying to replicate every piece of
information possible. In this context, 'shared' information includes
categories such as links to internal portals, dictionaries of acronyms,
names of teams and external partners. Given the potential breadth of
topics, another key decision was to start small and let user needs drive the
type of content made available. This ensures that the content of the wiki
is always useful to users and that no expansion is made without someone
asking for it.
16.3.6 Follow simple guidelines
Setting some ground rules was also helpful with the design of the wiki.
Although it is possible to allow semantic annotations anywhere on wiki
pages, doing so would require every contributor to be familiar with the
names of properties. It is both impractical and unrealistic to expect users will
be experts in the structure of the wiki. Using the Semantic Forms extension
added a much-needed level of abstraction over semantic annotations and
ensured that users can focus on content instead of having to struggle with
annotations directly. At the same time, the Free Text area available in most
forms allows more advanced users to capture additional annotations not
covered by the forms. This is an important feature as it allows the wiki to
adapt to exceptions to the structure provided by the forms.
Semantic Forms work best when wiki pages are modelled after the idea
of classes through the use of MediaWiki's built-in system of categories.
By restricting categories to represent only the nature of a page (what a
page is about), and setting the limit to only one category per page, it is
possible to take full advantage of Semantic MediaWiki's basic inference
model. For example, if Acronyms can be defi ned as a subcategory of
Defi nitions, a query for any page in the Defi nition category will also
return pages in the Acronym category.
This design choice has a few consequences on the behaviour of the
wiki.
■
With one category per page, it makes sense to have only template per
category and at least one form. Semantic Forms includes a convenient
wizard to create forms and templates from a list of semantic properties.
The association of a category, form, template and properties is what
defi nes a 'class' in Semantic MediaWiki.
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