The Experts below are selected from a list of 35526 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Ofer Arazy - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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corporate Wikis the effects of owners motivation and behavior on group members engagement
2013Co-Authors: Ofer Arazy, Ian R GellatlyAbstract:Originally designed as a tool to alleviate bottlenecks associated with knowledge management, the suitability of Wikis for corporate settings has been questioned given the inherent tensions between wiki affordances and the realities of organizational life. Drawing on regulatory focus theory and social cognitive theory, we developed and tested a model of the motivational dynamics underlying corporate Wikis. We examined leaders (owners) and users of 187 wiki-based projects within a large multinational firm. Our findings revealed two countervailing motivational forces, one oriented toward accomplishment and achievement (promotion focus) and one oriented toward safety and security (prevention focus), that not only predicted owners' participation but also the overall level of engagement within the wiki groups. Our primary contribution is in showing that, notwithstanding the potential benefits to users, Wikis can trigger risk-avoidance motives that potentially impede engagement. Practically, our findings call for an alignment between organizational procedures surrounding wiki deployment and the technology's affordances.
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DESRIST - What makes corporate Wikis work? wiki affordances and their suitability for corporate knowledge work
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012Co-Authors: M. Lisa Yeo, Ofer ArazyAbstract:Wikis were originally intended for knowledge work in the open Internet environment, and there seems to be an inherent tension between Wikis' affordances and the nature knowledge work in organizations. The objective of this paper is to investigate how tailoring Wikis to corporate settings would impact users' wiki activity. We begin by synthesizing prior works on Wikis' design principles; identifying several areas where we anticipate high tension between Wikis' affordances and organizational work practices. We put forward five propositions regarding how changes in corporate Wikis deployment procedures may impact users' wiki activity. An empirical study in one multi-national organization tested users' perceptions towards these propositions, revealing that in some cases there may be a need for modifying wiki's design, while in other cases corporations may wish to change their knowledge work practices to align with Wikis' affordances.
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corporate Wikis the effects of owners motivation and behavior on group members engagement
Journal of Management Information Systems, 2012Co-Authors: Ofer Arazy, Ian R GellatlyAbstract:Originally designed as a tool to alleviate bottlenecks associated with knowledge management, the suitability of Wikis for corporate settings has been questioned given the inherent tensions between wiki affordances and the realities of organizational life. Drawing on regulatory focus theory and social cognitive theory, we developed and tested a model of the motivational dynamics underlying corporate Wikis. We examined leaders (owners) and users of 187 wiki-based projects within a large multinational firm. Our findings revealed two countervailing motivational forces, one oriented toward accomplishment and achievement (promotion focus) and one oriented toward safety and security (prevention focus), that not only predicted owners' participation but also the overall level of engagement within the wiki groups. Our primary contribution is in showing that, notwithstanding the potential benefits to users, Wikis can trigger risk-avoidance motives that potentially impede engagement. Practically, our findings call fo...
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recognizing contributions in Wikis authorship categories algorithms and visualizations
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2010Co-Authors: Ofer Arazy, Eleni Stroulia, Stan Ruecker, Cristina Arias, Carlos Fiorentino, Veselin Ganev, Timothy YauAbstract:Wikis are designed to support collaborative editing, without focusing on individual contribution, such that it is not straightforward to determine who contributed to a specific page. However, as Wikis are increasingly adopted in settings such as business, government, and education, where editors are largely driven by career goals, there is a perceived need to modify Wikis so that each editor's contributions are clearly presented. In this paper we introduce an approach for assessing the contributions of wiki editors along several authorship categories, as well as a variety of information glyphs for visualizing this information. We report on three types of analysis: (a) assessing the accuracy of the algorithms, (b) estimating the understandability of the visualizations, and (c) exploring wiki editors' perceptions regarding the extent to which such an approach is likely to change their behavior. Our findings demonstrate that our proposed automated techniques can estimate fairly accurately the quantity of editors' contributions across various authorship categories, and that the visualizations we introduced can clearly convey this information to users. Moreover, our user study suggests that such tools are likely to change wiki editors' behavior. We discuss both the potential benefits and risks associated with solutions for estimating and visualizing wiki contributions. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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recognizing contributions in Wikis authorship categories algorithms and visualizations
2009Co-Authors: Ofer Arazy, Eleni Stroulia, Stan Ruecker, Cristina Arias, Carlos Fiorentino, Veselin Ganev, Timothy YauAbstract:Wikis are designed to support collaborative editing, without focusing on individual contribution, such that it is not straightforward to determine who contributed to a specific page. However, as Wikis are increasingly adopted in settings such as business, government, and education, where editors are largely driven by career goals, there is a perceived need to modify Wikis so that each editor's contributions are clearly presented. In this paper we introduce an approach for assessing the contributions of wiki editors along several authorship categories, as well as a variety of information glyphs for visualizing this information. We report on three types of analysis: (a) assessing the accuracy of the algorithms, (b) estimating the understandability of the visualizations, and (c) exploring wiki editors' perceptions regarding the extent to which such an approach is likely to change their behavior. Our findings demonstrate that our proposed automated techniques can estimate fairly accurately the quantity of editors' contributions across various authorship categories, and that the visualizations we introduced can clearly convey this information to users. Moreover, our user study suggests that such tools are likely to change wiki editors' behavior. We discuss both the potential benefits and risks associated with solutions for estimating and visualizing wiki contributions.
Pascal Molli - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Distributed Wikis: A Survey
Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 2014Co-Authors: Alan Davoust, Hala Skaf-molli, Pascal Molli, Babak Esfandiari, Khaled AslanAbstract:SUMMARY "Distributed Wiki" is a generic term covering various systems, including "peer-to-peer wiki," "mobile wiki," "offline wiki," "federated wiki" and others. Distributed Wikis distribute their pages among the sites of autonomous participants to address various motivations, including high availability of data, new collaboration models and different viewpoint of subjects. Although existing systems share some common basic concepts, it is often difficult to understand the specificity of each one, the underlying complexities or the best context in which to use it. In this paper, we define, classify and characterize distributed Wikis. We identify three classes of distributed wiki systems, each using a different collaboration model and distribution scheme for its pages: highly available Wikis, decentralized social Wikis and federated Wikis. We classify existing distributed Wikis according to these classes. We detail their underlying complexities and social and technical motivations. We also highlight some directions for research and opportunities for new systems with original social and technical motivations.
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Distributed Wikis: a survey
Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 2014Co-Authors: Alan Davoust, Hala Skaf-molli, Pascal Molli, Babak Esfandiari, Khaled AslanAbstract:'Distributed wiki' is a generic term covering various systems, including 'peer-to-peer wiki', 'mobile wiki', 'offline wiki', 'federated wiki' and others. Distributed Wikis distribute their pages among the sites of autonomous participants to address various motivations, including high availability of data, new collaboration models and different viewpoints of subjects. Although existing systems share some common basic concepts, it is often difficult to understand the specificity of each one, the underlying complexities or the best context in which to use it. In this paper, we define, classify and characterize distributed Wikis. We identify three classes of distributed wiki systems, each using a different collaboration model and distribution scheme for its pages: highly available Wikis, decentralized social Wikis and federated Wikis. We classify existing distributed Wikis according to these classes. We detail their underlying complexities and social and technical motivations. We also highlight some directions for research and opportunities for new systems with original social and technical motivations. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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Personal Navigation in Semantic Wikis
2009Co-Authors: Diego Torres, Hala Skaf-molli, Alicia Diaz, Pascal MolliAbstract:In this paper, we propose a personal navigation approach to Semantic Wikis. In semantic Wikis, Wikis pages are annotated with semantic data to facilitate research and navigation. The navigation is collaborative designed and shared by every user. However, individuals involved in a collaborative knowledge building activity need to customize the navigation according to her personal needs. In order to overcome this, we extend semantic Wikis with personal annotations facilities to support personal navigation. This approach diers from other adaptive navigation approaches, because of the personalization is carried out by the user herself. We have implemented and validated these ideas on the top of a P2P semantic wiki.
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SWooki: Un Wiki Sémantique sur réseau Pair-à-Pair
Revue des Sciences et Technologies de l'Information - Série ISI : Ingénierie des Systèmes d'Information, 2009Co-Authors: Charbel Rahhal, Hala Skaf-molli, Pascal MolliAbstract:Wiki systems have evolved in two different ways : semantic Wikis and peer to peer Wikis. Semantic Wikis integrate the semantic web technologies in order to improve their structure, the search and the navigation between pages. Peer-to-peer Wikis offer a support for massive collaboration, off-line editing mode and an ad-hoc collaboration. The main challenge in designing a peer-to-peer semantic wiki combining both approaches is the merge of wiki pages embedding semantic annotations. Merging algorithms used in peer-to-peer wiki systems have been designed for linear text. They do not handle semantic data. In this paper, we present SWooki the first peer-to-peer semantic wiki. SWooki combines the advantages of both semantic Wikis and peer-to-peer Wikis. We detail SWooki approach and its merging algorithm, we insist on its characteristics and its functionalities. We conclude by presenting its architecture and its implementation.
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Peer-to-peer semantic Wikis
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2009Co-Authors: Hala Skaf-molli, Charbel Rahhal, Pascal MolliAbstract:Wikis have demonstrated how it is possible to convert a com- munity of strangers into a community of collaborators. Semantic Wikis have opened an interesting way to mix web 2.0 advantages with the semantic web approach. P2P Wikis have illustrated how Wikis can be deployed on P2P Wikis and take advantages of its intrinsic qualities: fault-tolerance, scalability and infrastructure cost sharing. In this paper, we present the first P2P semantic wiki that combines advantages of se- mantic Wikis and P2P Wikis. Building a P2P semantic wiki is challenging. It requires building an optimistic replication algorithm that is compati- ble with P2P constraints, ensures an acceptable level of consistency and generic enough to handle semantic wiki pages. The contribution of this paper is the definition of a clear model for building P2P semantic Wikis. We define the data model, operations on this model, intentions of these operations, algorithms to ensure consistency and finally we implement the SWOOKI prototype based on these algorithms.
Sebastian Schaffert - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Semantic Wikis
IEEE Software, 2008Co-Authors: Sebastian Schaffert, Joachim Baumeister, François Bry, Malte KieselAbstract:Lean knowledge management is today implemented mostly through Wikis, which let users enter text and other data, such as files, and connect the content through hyperlinks. Easy setup and a huge variety of editing support are primary reasons for wiki use in all types of intranet- and Internet-based information sharing (see P. Louridas, "Using Wikis in Software Development," IEEE Software, Mar. 2006, pp. 88- 91). The drawbacks show up when you need to structure data as opposed to just edit text. Many Wikis have tons of useful content, but the volume and lack of structure make it inaccessible over time. This is where semantic Wikis enter the picture. Sebastian Schaffert and his colleagues describe them here and explain how to model wiki knowledge and content for improved usability. I look forward to hearing from both readers and prospective authors about this column and the technologies you want to know more about.
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Reasoning in Semantic Wikis
Reasoning Web, 2007Co-Authors: Markus Krötzsch, Sebastian Schaffert, Denny VrandeˇAbstract:Semantic Wikis combine the collaborative environment of a classical wiki with features of semantic technologies. Semantic data is used to structure information in the wiki, to improve information access by intelligent search and navigation, and to enable knowledge exchange across applications. Though semantic Wikis hardly support complex semantic knowledge and inferencing, we argue that this is not due to a lack of practical use cases. We discuss various tasks for which advanced reasoning is desirable, and identify open challenges for the development of inferencing tools and formalisms. Our goal is to outline concrete options for overcoming current problems, since we believe that many problems in semantic Wikis are prototypical for other Semantic Web applications as well. Throughout the paper, we refer to our semantic wiki implementations IkeWiki and Semantic MediaWiki for practical illustration.
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Int. Sym. Wikis - Wiki-based knowledge engineering: second workshop on semantic Wikis
Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Wikis - WikiSym '06, 2006Co-Authors: Max Völkel, Sebastian Schaffert, Elena Pasaru-bontas, Sören AuerAbstract:Wikis are collaborative environments for authoring Web content. This workshop explores the role of semantic Wikis in knowledge engineering. Semantic Wikis try to combine the strengths of semantic (machine processable, data integration, complex queries) and Wiki (easy to use and contribute, strongly interconnected, collaboration) technologies.
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SemWiki - Learning with Semantic Wikis.
2006Co-Authors: Tobias Bürger, Diana Bischof, Andreas Gruber, Wolf Hilzensauer, Sebastian SchaffertAbstract:The knowledge society requires life-long learning and flexible learning environments that allow learners to learn whenever they have time, whereever they are, and according to their own needs and background knowledge. In this article, we investigate how Semantic Wikis – a combination of Wiki and Semantic Web technology – can support learners in such flexible learning environments. We first summarise common features of Wikis and Semantic Wikis and then describe different aspects of Semantic Wikis for learning. We also introduce our Semantic Wiki system called IkeWiki and show why it is particularly promising as
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learning with semantic Wikis
SemWiki, 2006Co-Authors: Tobias Bürger, Diana Bischof, Andreas Gruber, Wolf Hilzensauer, Sebastian SchaffertAbstract:The knowledge society requires life-long learning and flexible learning environments that allow learners to learn whenever they have time, whereever they are, and according to their own needs and background knowledge. In this article, we investigate how Semantic Wikis – a combination of Wiki and Semantic Web technology – can support learners in such flexible learning environments. We first summarise common features of Wikis and Semantic Wikis and then describe different aspects of Semantic Wikis for learning. We also introduce our Semantic Wiki system called IkeWiki and show why it is particularly promising as
Timothy Yau - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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recognizing contributions in Wikis authorship categories algorithms and visualizations
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2010Co-Authors: Ofer Arazy, Eleni Stroulia, Stan Ruecker, Cristina Arias, Carlos Fiorentino, Veselin Ganev, Timothy YauAbstract:Wikis are designed to support collaborative editing, without focusing on individual contribution, such that it is not straightforward to determine who contributed to a specific page. However, as Wikis are increasingly adopted in settings such as business, government, and education, where editors are largely driven by career goals, there is a perceived need to modify Wikis so that each editor's contributions are clearly presented. In this paper we introduce an approach for assessing the contributions of wiki editors along several authorship categories, as well as a variety of information glyphs for visualizing this information. We report on three types of analysis: (a) assessing the accuracy of the algorithms, (b) estimating the understandability of the visualizations, and (c) exploring wiki editors' perceptions regarding the extent to which such an approach is likely to change their behavior. Our findings demonstrate that our proposed automated techniques can estimate fairly accurately the quantity of editors' contributions across various authorship categories, and that the visualizations we introduced can clearly convey this information to users. Moreover, our user study suggests that such tools are likely to change wiki editors' behavior. We discuss both the potential benefits and risks associated with solutions for estimating and visualizing wiki contributions. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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recognizing contributions in Wikis authorship categories algorithms and visualizations
2009Co-Authors: Ofer Arazy, Eleni Stroulia, Stan Ruecker, Cristina Arias, Carlos Fiorentino, Veselin Ganev, Timothy YauAbstract:Wikis are designed to support collaborative editing, without focusing on individual contribution, such that it is not straightforward to determine who contributed to a specific page. However, as Wikis are increasingly adopted in settings such as business, government, and education, where editors are largely driven by career goals, there is a perceived need to modify Wikis so that each editor's contributions are clearly presented. In this paper we introduce an approach for assessing the contributions of wiki editors along several authorship categories, as well as a variety of information glyphs for visualizing this information. We report on three types of analysis: (a) assessing the accuracy of the algorithms, (b) estimating the understandability of the visualizations, and (c) exploring wiki editors' perceptions regarding the extent to which such an approach is likely to change their behavior. Our findings demonstrate that our proposed automated techniques can estimate fairly accurately the quantity of editors' contributions across various authorship categories, and that the visualizations we introduced can clearly convey this information to users. Moreover, our user study suggests that such tools are likely to change wiki editors' behavior. We discuss both the potential benefits and risks associated with solutions for estimating and visualizing wiki contributions.
Gorka Puente - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Wiki Scaffolding: Aligning Wikis with the corporate strategy
Information Systems, 2012Co-Authors: Oscar Díaz, Gorka PuenteAbstract:Wikis are main exponents of collaborative development by user communities. This community may be created around the wiki itself (e.g., community of contributors in Wikipedia) or already exist (e.g., company employees in corporate Wikis). In the latter case, the wiki is not created in a vacuum but as part of the information ecosystem of the hosting organization. As any other Information System resource, wiki success highly depends on the interplay of technology, work practice and the organization. Thus, wiki contributions should be framed along the concerns already in use in the hosting organization in terms of glossaries, schedules, policies, organigrams and the like. The question is then, how can corporate strategies permeate wiki construction while preserving wiki openness and accessibility? We advocate for the use of ''Wiki Scaffoldings'', i.e., a wiki installation that is provided at the onset to mimic these corporate concerns: categories, users, templates, articles initialized with boilerplate text, are all introduced in the wiki before any contribution is made. To retain Wikis' friendliness and engage layman participation, we propose scaffoldings to be described as mind maps. Mind maps are next ''exported'' as wiki installations. We show the feasibility of the approach introducing a Wiki Scaffolding Language (WSL). WSL is realized as a plugin for FreeMind, a popular tool for mind mapping. Finally, we validate the expressiveness of WSL in four case studies. WSL is available for download.
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Int. Sym. Wikis - Wiki scaffolding: helping organizations to set up Wikis
Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration - WikiSym '11, 2011Co-Authors: Oscar Díaz, Gorka PuenteAbstract:Organizational Wikis are framed by an existing organization. This makes these Wikis be especially vigilant upon (1) facilitating the alignment of the wiki with organizational practices, (2) engaging management or (3), promoting employees' participation. To this end, we advocate for the use of "wiki scaffoldings". A wiki scaffolding is a wiki installation that is provided at the onset, before any contribution is made. It aims to frame wiki contribution along the concerns already known in the hosting organization in terms of glossaries, schedules, organigrams and the like. Thus, wiki contributions do not start from scratch but within a known setting. This paper introduces a language to capture wiki scaffolding in terms of FreeMind's mind maps. These maps can later be mapped into wiki installations in MediaWiki. The paper seeks to validate the approach in a twofold manner. Firstly, by providing literature quotes that suggest the need for scaffolding. Secondly, by providing scaffolding examples for Wikis reported in the literature. The findings suggest that wiki scaffolding can be useful to smoothly align wiki activity along the practices of the hosting organization from the onset.
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Int. Sym. Wikis - Model-aware Wiki analysis tools: the case of HistoryFlow
Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration - WikiSym '10, 2010Co-Authors: Oscar Díaz, Gorka PuenteAbstract:Wikis are becoming mainstream. Studies confirm how Wikis are finding their way into organizations. This paper focuses on requirements for analysis tools for corporate Wikis. Corporate Wikis differ from their grow-up counterparts such as Wikipedia. First, they tend to be much smaller. Second, they require analysis to be customized for their own domains. So far, most analysis tools focus on large Wikis where handling efficiently large bulks of data is paramount. This tends to make analysis tools access directly the wiki database. This binds the tool to the wiki engine, hence, jeopardizing customizability and interoperability. However, corporate Wikis are not so big while customizability is a desirable feature. This change in requirements advocates for analysis tools to be decoupled from the underlying wiki engines. Our approach argues for characterizing analysis tools in terms of their abstract analysis model (e.g. a graph model, a contributor model). How this analysis model is then map into wiki-implementation terms is left to the wiki administrator. The administrator, as the domain expert, can better assess which is the right terms/granularity to conduct the analysis. This accounts for suitability and interoperability gains. The approach is borne out for HistoryFlow, an IBM tool for visualizing evolving wiki pages and the interactions of multiple wiki authors.
