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
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
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
