Re: Proposal merging use case 2 (wikis) and use case 8 (educational metadata)

Dan Connolly a écrit :
> This is quite nice. Is it a real-world case-study or
> a hypothetical use case? It sounds quite real, but I can't
> find any Technical University of Marcilly  in the web.
>   
Both ;-)
I work with Michel Buffa who experimented with wikis at the university 
of Nice (see [1] for a collection of feedbacks he gathered)
As for Marcilly it is the name of a small village I grew-up in [2] and 
that probably won't have a university before the next century ;-)

[1] Intranet wikis", Buffa, M., Intraweb workshop at WWW 06,
  
http://www-sop.inria.fr/acacia/WORKSHOPS/IntraWebs2006/Buffa_Intrawebs2006.pdf
[2] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcilly-en-Villette
> (Note that I edited the subject of this thread; "use case 8" is going
> to make no sense to somebody looking thru the archives months
> from now.)
>   
Good point.
> [...]
>   
> That sentence about refactoring is a bit obscure; a "For
> example..." would perhaps help.
>   
> (...)
> I'm not sure that's clear enough on its own. Please either elaborate
> with another sentence or two... perhaps a "For example..." or maybe
> leave it out.
> (...)
>   
Here is a revised version:
Use case #2 - A wiki for learning: The Technical University of Marcilly 
decided to use wikis to foster knowledge exchanges between lecturers and 
students.

The Technical University of Marcilly (TMU) decided to use wikis to 
foster knowledge exchanges between lecturers and students. They tested 
several wikis over the years and they want to experiment with novel ways 
of structuring the wiki to improve navigation and retrieval and they 
also want to make it easier to reuse learning objects in different 
contexts. Ideally TMU wants the information structuring the wiki to be:
- easy to add, edit, enrich and this should be done at the same time a 
user edits a page to avoid multiplying interfaces and manipulations.
- explicit and understandable to machines so that the wiki engine can 
rely on it to propose related pages, to perform precise search, to 
generate browsing interfaces, to build dynamic indexes based on 
customized queries and to provide customized sorting and filtering for them.
- accessible to other applications to allow integration with other 
information systems, links or migration to other wiki engines, extension 
of its functionalities, etc.

In this context TMU uses metadata embedded in the wikipages to:
- store the results of social tagging on the pages: tags suggested by 
users are inserted in the page itself and may reuse data from the page 
(e.g. the authors name) or annotate specific portions of the page (e.g. 
type a paragraph as a definition, categorize an image);
- generate navigation widgets: lists of forward and back links to 
navigate the wiki, lists of similar pages, list of all pages tagged with 
a specific topic, view of the clusters of pages, etc.
- enrich them with schemata to restructure the wiki (declare equivalent 
tags, broader/narrower tags, add synonymous labels to existing tags, 
etc.) and enrich the navigation with these links;
- include queries on these metadata in the wikipages to dynamically 
generate tailored indexes for the different departments, the different 
years, the different topics, etc.
- import learning objects edited in classical word processing 
application by using the styles of the different sections to extract 
annotations for each section and recompose new documents (e.g. transform 
a handout into a web site for practical sessions).

Therefore, from the technical stand point, TMU designed a wiki that 
stores its pages directly in XHTML and RDF annotations are used to 
represent the wiki structure and annotate the wikipages and the objects 
it contains (images, uploaded files, etc.). The RDF structure allows 
refactoring the wiki structure by editing the RDF annotations and the 
RDFS schemas they are based on. For example if a user annotated a page 
with "Algebra" and another one with "Linear Algebra" a subClassOf 
property can be instantiated between the two classes representing these 
topics (or another relation as in SKOS) in order to regroup pages, 
generate see-also links or calculate transitive closure before a SPARQL 
query to retrieve both pages when looking for pages about "Algebra".
RDF annotations are embedded in the wiki pages themselves using the RDFa 
and microformats. Some of the learning objects can be saved in XML 
formats and an XSLT stylesheet exploits the styles used for the session 
to tag the different parts (e.g. definition, exercise, example) and 
these annotation can then be used to generate new views on this resource 
(e.g. list of definition, hypertext support for practical sessions, etc.).
The embedded RDF is extracted using a GRDDL XSLT stylesheets available 
online to provide semantic annotations directly to the application that 
needs to extract the embedded metadata:
- if someone sends a wiki page to someone else the annotations follow it 
and can be processed by applications of the recipient;
- if another application crawls (e.g. the crawler of a search engine) 
the wiki site it can extract the metadata and reuse them just by 
applying the same GRDDL transformation;
- if a new community of practice of TMU (e.g. the accountants) wants a 
dedicated index of its working document, it can be embedding the 
corresponding SPARQL query in a wikipage: the search engine fed with the 
GRDDL results solves this query and the result is rendered by an XSLT 
stylesheet and embedded in the page;
- if the wiki engine is to be changed, the migration transformations can 
exploit the embedded metadata. For instance the existing tags can be 
used to sort the pages in the right categories of the new wiki system 
(e.g. in TWiki pages are grouped in collections called "webs" that could 
be derived from tags);
- if a division wants to setup access rules to some documents, they can 
be based on these metadata merged with others (e.g. only lecturer can 
access document tagged as "tests").
- if some users are interested in being informed on any new information 
on a topic (e.g. chemists want to be informed on any new norm for the 
environment) they can use notification systems monitoring the wiki by 
querying its metadata (e.g. recurrent SPARQL queries on pages tagged 
with "environment")
- etc.


PS: the new prototype of such a wiki (SweetWiki) is online and if you 
want to test edition you can register:
http://miageprojet.unice.fr:8080/wiki/data/Main/MainHome.jsp

-- 
"Every conviction is a prison."
           -- F. W. Nietzsche.
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