20th of July 2011: The article Hybrid Wikis: Empowering Users to Collaboratively Structure Information was selected as the best paper at the International Conference on Software and Data Management 2011 (ICSOFT 2011), Sevilla, Spain.
Hybrid Wikis provide a lightweight semantic extension to the collaboration platform Tricia which comprises a traditional wiki as a core component. In contrast to more heavyweight approaches as semantic wikis, the Hybrid Wiki approach does not focus on annotating wiki content with semantic information corresponding to a fixed ontology, which could be regarded as a top-down (i.e., ontology first) approach. In contrast, it allows a kind of ontology or datamodel to emerge from the content by enabling users to easily add structured content to any wiki page in the form of arbitrary named attributes or tags. Guidance is provided by suggesting terms that are frequently used by other users and the ability to derive new pages from existing ones. This bottom-up approach is complemented with the ability to establish certain constraints such as mandatory attributes or inheritance relationships between types. By applying these to stable parts of the schema that emerged over time further processing of the structured content - for example the generation of visualizations - becomes possible.
Watch this video to see Hybrid Wikis in action:
The Hybrid Wiki approach is currently used in several scientific and industrial projects. To get an impression of the Hybrid Wiki you can access (read-only) the following sites which are publically available provided by these projects:
If you want to try a Hybrid Wiki application providing read- and write-access you can select one of the following options:
There are several ongoing projects that apply the mechanisms provided by the Hybrid Wiki in an enterprise architecture mangement context. A lightweight Wiki-based approach to document and analyze the enterprise architecture enables employees throughout the company to collaboratively maintain and develop the enterprise architecture and to establish an enterprise-wide information model in a bottom-up fashion.
We are currently establishing a community of practitioners driving the further evolution oft he Wiki-based approach. For further information please visit the official Wiki4EAM Community website.
The Hybrid Wiki system provides an extension which enables to automatically generate semantically consistent visualizations of information models emerged bottom-up by means of the Hybrid Wiki approach.These visualizations are based on the System Cartography Tool SyCaTool.
A sample of data captured with the Hybrid Wiki approach and visualized by the SyCaTool can be found in the SyCa Store Example.
If you want to use Hybrid Wiki together with the SyCa-Tool extension, the following system requirements have to be considered:
