1. WikiSym 2010
Gdańsk, Poland , July 7-9, 2010
The Austrian way of Wiki(pedia)!
Development of a Structured Wiki-based
Encyclopedia within a Local Austrian context
Ilire Hasani-Mavriqi
IICM, Graz University of Technology, Austria
ihasani@iicm.edu

2. Introduction
 Austria-Forum aims to:
 Overcome the identified problems in using online
encyclopedias in education
 Provide information within a local Austrian context

3. 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

4. Educational use of online encyclopedias
 Problems:
 copy&paste syndrome in combination with incorrect and
unchecked information
 fragmentation of knowledge (acquisition of superficial
knowledge)

5. Educational use of online encyclopedias
 Solutions:
 control the quality of published information
 support users in context sensitive searching and browsing
of available information

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. Publishing process (3/4)
 Figure

10. 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

11. 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

12. System overview

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. Thank you for your attention!
Questions?