Link Recommender for Wikis
In companies wiki systems are increasingly used for knowledge management because they allow creating websites in the Internet and intranet fast and collaboratively. An important feature of wikis is that they allow authors to insert links to other pages to point to related pages or to indicate missing content. However, current wiki systems fail to support authors in creating these links, e.g., the author needs to know the title of the target page. As a result, the authors have to be familiar with the whole content of the wiki in order to create useful links to related pages. If they do not know the wiki then they are unable to provide useful links and the wiki is less benefitial as a knowledge management tool. Moreover, it may happen that authors create two pages on the same topic without knowing of each other.
In this project we develop extensions to existing wiki systems that ease the pain of creating links between wiki pages. As a basis, we follow a fully automatic and a semi-automatic approach being explained in the following.
Automatic Linking
In our first demonstrator, a link generator plug-in to an XWiki system, we experimented with the automatic generation of links with respect to domain ontologies. The plug-in recognizes words and phrases in a wiki page that are concepts of an ontology. Then it modifies the wiki text on-the-fly and wraps these words and phrases in a link. The link points to the search page of the wiki searching for the found concept and semantically related concepts (e.g., synonyms, direct super/direct sub concepts).
In the figure below we see an example of a generated link. The plug-in recognizes the term "Arbeitsentgelts" (genitive of the wage) as the concept "Arbeitsentgelt" (wage) of a domain ontology. The domain ontology contains relationships to related concepts "Bruttolohn" (gross wage), "laufend gezahltes Arbeitsentgelt" (continuously paid wage), and "Arbeitslohn" (income). The system wraps the term "Arbeitsentgelts" in a link which leads to the result page of a search for '"Bruttolohn" "laufend gezahltes Arbeitsentgelt" "Arbeitslohn "Arbeitsentgelt"'
The advantage of this approach is that the system takes care of creating links in a page. However, as a disadvantage, the multitude of links in a page may distract the reader from the important related pages. Thus, we are currently researching semi-automatic approaches.
Semi-automatic Linking
With extension link recommender we aim at two goals: (1) Present potential link targets to the author with respect to a selected text and (2) allow associating multiple link targets with a selected text. The link recommender is implemented as a panel on top of the XWiki system. The user selects some text and then clicks a button to obtain a list of pages that could be related to it. In the background the system makes use of domain ontologies to include synonyms and related concepts in the search. The author selects appropriate page targets from the list and the system generates the corresponding links. In the future we plan to extend the link recommender to propose link targets for a complete text (similar to current services annotating arbitrary texts).