Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of certain extensions means that making them fi t seamlessly in a wiki can
be a frustrating experience. It is necessary to decide early if features
provided by an extension are absolutely necessary and to keep
customisations to minimum. If customisations are required, keep track of
changes to external code and work with the original authors of the
extension to push for integration if possible. Furthermore, the lack of
detailed documentation is an on-going issue with any open source project.
Fortunately, the community around Semantic MediaWiki is active and
responsive to questions and requests.
16.3.9 Knowledge mapping
One of the major obstacles to using Semantic MediaWiki as an
encyclopaedia is that it requires the relatively hard work of breaking
information into pages and linking them together. Semantic Forms does
make this task easier, but it still requires a lot of effort to get people used
to the idea. This is especially visible when someone is trying to transfer
their knowledge into a relatively empty area of a wiki. Under ideal
conditions, users would have that content already available in a
spreadsheet ready to load with the Data Transfer extension, assuming
there is not a lot of overlap with the current content of the wiki. In
practice, users have reports, presentation slides or emails, which make it
hard to break into a structured collection of pages. For example, a system
confi guration report would have to be mapped into individual pages
about servers, applications, databases, service accounts and so on. Once
that hurdle is passed, the payoff is worth the effort. Being able to query
wiki content like a database is vastly superior to the idea of search, but,
in order to show this to users in a convincing way, someone has to go
through the painful job of manual updates, data curation and individual
interviews to import that content for them.
Mapping relationships between people, organisations and other topics
is a crucial step towards building a rich map of expertise in an organisation.
As the graph of relationships is coming from both automated and manual
inputs, the links between people and content tend to be more relevant
than automated categorisations performed by search engines. The quality
of these relationships was confi rmed empirically by observing improved
search results when the content of the wiki was added to an enterprise
search engine. Another side effect of using Semantic MediaWiki is the
increased pressure for disambiguation, shared vocabularies, and
lightweight ontology building. As page titles are required to be unique,
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