wiki-thoughts: Instiki - Focus on Content publishing in wiki systems

Thoughts on Structured/Unstructured and Shared Information Management using Wiki and other emerging technologies

Friday, October 22, 2004

Instiki - Focus on Content publishing in wiki systems

Spate of recent wiki announcements - such as application-oriented wiki JotSpot . For enterprise focus, being able to create application workflows in quick way is going to be important - in such a way that you can reuse the schemas and "code", and wikis provide just the right framework for the same. We essentially need to make sure that both the skillsets and time required to introduce a new workflow within the IT infrastructure will have to be reduced significantly.

And another wiki - Instiki on the block. The key feature of this wiki is being able to publish to different URL, which is more important from content-management perspective (which is another main theme in enterprises).

Publishing is not well implemented in current set of wiki systems. What capabilities do we require (assuming content is prepared for collaboration)?

Be able to produce good HTML, along with appropriate styles etc. Usually this means casting the content into one of the standard templates such as a news item, standard process information document and as such.
Make it an independent document, with careful control of outgoing links. Within a wiki system, links are introduced automatically - just by refering to Camel-Case (and similar) topic names. But in published content, the links are usually minimized, and made sure that they refer to previously published information only. So the the publishing algorithm should identify and inform the content authors to make sure the links are properly resolved. (And, it is better to provide them as an appendix or notes.)
Version of published documents (as visible to the audience) is not related to versioning provided by Wiki systems. The published versions of documents are for formal communication purposes. Usually a manual table can be included (which tracks published versions and maps it to wiki versions), but sometimes, this version information can be useful in overall enterprise content management systems. In which case, it needs to be available as metadata.
A good and flexible interface to create and manage navigation of published content. (Usually a hierarchy.) Wiki systems only provide a hierarchy for fast collaboration, and this is not usually sufficient for organization needs for published content. Accordingly, the embedded links need to be modified to refer to the published destinations.

Instiki says it makes it easy to publish information to new hierarchy of URLs. So this needs to be watched.

permalink 9:07 AM

About this blog

All realms of collaboration:

Wiki. Weblogs
New Integration Platforms for combined structured and unstructured information: Wiki, Portals, Email Clients,
Collaborative Document editing, Collaborative knowledge building
Email Interfaces to collaborative shares
Information organization, management, Publishing: In context of organizations, individuals, Opensource projects etc.

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Name:Vinod Kulkarni

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