The Austrian way of Wiki(pedia)!Development of a Structured Wiki-based

Encyclopedia within a Local Austrian context

Ilire Hasani-MavriqiIICM, Graz University of Technology, Austria

ihasani@iicm.edu

WikiSym 2010 Gdańsk, Poland , July 7-9, 2010

Introduction

Austria-Forum aims to:

Overcome the identified problems in using online encyclopedias in education

Provide information within a local Austrian context

Local Austrian context

Local Austrian content vs. global Wikipedia-like content

Different target groups of users Users with special interest in Austria get fine-grained

information German chapter of Wikipedia does not provide such

detailed information

Educational use of online encyclopedias

Problems: copy&paste syndrome in combination with incorrect and

unchecked information fragmentation of knowledge (acquisition of superficial

knowledge)

Educational use of online encyclopedias

Solutions: control the quality of published information support users in context sensitive searching and browsing

of available information

Quality-inspected content

Main goal: citable articles Correctness of articles is guaranteed Authors are authenticated with their real names Articles achieve a level of maturity and do not

change any more Control the content, but allow openness and

collaboration as well

Publishing process (1/4)

Four key publishers A board of editors – 70 well known Austrian experts

in different fields A team of five employed editors Politically independent Community / users

Publishing process (2/4)

Three main lexica AEIOU- an existing Austria-Lexicon “Wissenssamlungen” – special lexica on special topics Community area

Articles in the first two lexica are mainly contributed by key publishers and editors

Volunteers / community can contribute as well

Publishing process (3/4)

Figure

Publishing process (4/4)

Users can edit / create new articles in the Community area

Articles are reviewed by one or more editors When certain criteria are met, these are “stamped”

as citable Citable: who wrote the article and when it was

written Authors credited for their contribution Collaboration is enabled through: comments, discussions, new articles

Context-aware searching and browsing

Content organized in hierarchical categories Category-sensitive searching and browsing Tag clouds Tag / metadata driven search Implementation based on JSPWiki 2.8

System overview

Structuring content (1/2)

Two main categorizations in wikis: tag based categorization add a “category” tag to documents

sub-paging a category must exist before creating a sub-page interlinking between category-pages and sub-pages is

done automatically

Structuring content (2/2)

Sub-paging in Austria-Forum: unlimited levels of categories and sub-categories

(hierarchical) implemented as an extra feature Insert page plugin

Visualization of the structured content paginating views of categories glossary based visualization of sub-pages available within

a category

Retrieving content

Information retrieval schema based on structural URLs and links

Example: biography of an author URL: http://www.austria-

lexikon.at/af/Biographien/Lorenz_Konrad Referenced through: [Biographien/Lorenz_Konrad]

No relative linking schema: users always know in what context they find certain information

Tagging content

Why include tagging? Enhance organization of information items Group related documents in tag-clouds Improve navigation and search Category pages have their own contextualized tag-clouds

Searching content

Context-aware and metadata searching Within a category Spare users from excessive retrieval results Refine retrieval results through metadata

Apache Lucene, field-data structure for metadata Full-text, tag / title search

Current status Launched in October 2009 90.000 information items (documents and multimedia

content) Four key publishers Board of editors (40 at that time) Editorial team (5 members)

Currently: ~ 130.000 information items 70 members of editorial board Attracts ~3500 users per day Community contributions - increased

Future work

Popularize Austria-Forum Use it as a collaborative learning tool in schools and

universities Project with NetBeans and SVN

Research: Collecting and applying metadata (updates from APA –

Austria Presse Agentur) Mobile devices, e-books Interlinking and link control

Thank you for your attention!

Questions?