Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
biomedical data sources in a way that can be programmatically exploited
across a multitude of applications within J&J.
16.4 Conclusion and future directions
Three years into using Semantic MediaWiki as a base for an Enterprise
Encyclopaedia, usage is still ramping up, already expanding beyond the
original informatics user base into topics relevant to the whole
organisation. However, many areas of improvements remain.
Queries in many formats do not replace the power of an interactive,
visual exploration of relationships graph captured in the wiki. Although
many attempts have been made to visualise relationships in a wiki, very
few make good use of semantic annotations provided by Semantic
MediaWiki. Wiki-based visualisation tools at this point are mainly the
product of academic research, using methods and tools developed for the
occasion of the research. There is still a need for a robust browser to
explore semantic relationships in an interactive way, with the layers,
fi lters and links that would be required of that type of visualisation.
Similarly, although many bots exist to help automate maintenance tasks
in a MediaWiki instance, we were not able to fi nd examples of bots designed
to work specifi cally for the maintenance of Semantic MediaWiki content.
With the exception of the Gardening tools provided with the Halo Extension,
creating a bot to perform batch updates of annotations or synchronisation
of content with remote sources still requires the customisation of bots
designed to work with text operations (search and replace strings) instead
of semantic operations (remove or add values to semantic properties).
Finally, making queries more user-friendly would help a lot with
adoption. Building queries still requires certain knowledge of available
properties and how they relate to categories in the wiki. Additionally,
there is no easy way at the moment to save the result of a query as a new
page, which would be very helpful for users to share and comment on the
results of their queries. An interesting example of this type of saved
queries can be found in the Woogle extension, where users can persist
with interesting search results, promote or remove individual results and
comment the result page itself as a wiki page [22].
Regarding KnowIt as an Enterprise Encyclopaedia, several challenges
remain. As is the case with many wiki projects, fostering the right levels
of participation requires a constant effort of education, community
outreach and usability improvements. Overall, Semantic MediaWiki
provides a fl exible yet structured platform to experiment with many
Search WWH ::
Custom Search