Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the same pathway present very powerful demonstrations of the value of
this social tagging.
Finally, Targetpedia is of course, a wiki, and whereas much of the
above has concerned the import, organisation and presentation of
existing information, we wanted to also enable the capture of pertinent
content from our users. This is, in fact, more complex than it might
initially seem. As described in the business analysis section, many research
units were running their own wikis, annotating protein pages with
specifi c project information. However, this is somewhat at odds with a
company-wide system, where different units working on the same target
would not want their information to be merged. Furthermore, pages
containing large sections of content that are specifi cally written by or for
a very limited group of people erodes the 'encyclopaedia' vision for
Targetpedia. To address this, it was decided that the main protein pages
would not be editable, allowing us to retain the uniform structure, layout
and content across all entries. This also meant that updating would be
signifi cantly simpler, not having to distinguish between user-generated
and automatically loaded content.
To provide wiki functionality, users can (with a single click) create
new 'child' pages that are automatically and very clearly linked to the
main page for that protein. These can be assigned with different
scopes, such as a user-page, for example 'Lee Harland's PDE5 page', a
project page, for example 'The Kinase Group Page For MAPK2'
and a research unit page, for example 'Oncology p53 programme
page'. In this way, both the encyclopaedia and the RU-specifi c
information capture aspects of Targetpedia are possible in the same
system. Search results for a protein will always take a user to a main
page, but all child pages are clearly visible and accessible from this
entry point. At present, the template for the subpages is quite open,
allowing teams to build those pages as they see fi t, in keeping with
their work in their own wiki systems. Finally, there may be instances
where people wish to add very short annotations - a key paper or a
URL that points to some useful information. For this, the child page
mechanism may be overkill. Therefore, we added a fourth collaborative
function that allows users to enter a short (255 character) message by
clicking the 'add comment' button on the social tagging toolbar. Crucially,
the messages are not written into the page itself, but stored within the
SMW system and dynamically included via an embedded ASK query.
This retains the simple update pattern for the main page
and allows for modifi cation to the presentation of the comments in
future versions.
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