Facilitating Structuring of Information for Business Users with Hybrid Wikis

The flexibility and general applicability of wikis make them a valuable tool for information management and collaboration in modern enterprises. Since information in traditional wikis is only stored in form of unstructured text pages, the way it can be accessed by users is limited to fulltext search and navigation along the links in wiki pages. Some wikis try to overcome this limitation by allowing users to enrich text with semantic annotations, usually being defined in semantic web ontologies. While this provides database-like querying capabilities, it requires that business users learn a specific syntax and understand modelling concepts they are not familiar with. Our approach, called Hybrid Wikis, introduces a small set of simple structuring concepts, namely attributes, type tags, and constraints. Furthermore, we propose to apply user interface elements that users understand, such as forms, spreadsheet-like tables, and faceted search interfaces, even though this limits expressive power. We illustrate our approach using an example scenario and highlight key implementation aspects of a Java-based hybrid wiki system. The paper concludes with practical experiences we gained in two usage scenarios, an overview of related work, and an outlook on future research.