WikiNetNav

WikiNetNav is a social network graph-based tool for navigating wiki changes and to personalize change notification by page and contributor.

By: Nelson Ko, Citadel Rock Online Communities Inc./Carleton University/TikiWiki

Introduction

Graph-based tools have been used in visualizations of social networks in many contexts, including business, communications, transportation, and knowledge networks.

Social network analysis of wiki pages, their authorship, and relationships between contributors currently utilize graph-based visualizations. However, there is no readily available tool for end-users to visualize these networks.

WikiNetNav is a new tool for wiki end-users to explore social networks implied through co-authorship, review changes made by other users, and to personalize and visualize their desired change notifications. This new graph-based tool will allow the monitoring of wiki pages as well as authors.

Users will be able to visualize the social network of contributors so as to more easily identify and select contributors to monitor based on their interests. This also facilitates identification of experts or possessors of relevant tacit knowledge.

In addition, the new tool can present the page linking network of monitored wiki pages, allowing users to more easily select additional pages to monitor.

Invitation to Participate

WikiNetNav currently only works with TikiWiki but my plans are to abstract the core parts of WikiNetNav from the TikiWiki implementation so that it can be used with other wikis as well. I will be setting this up as an open source project, so let me know if you are interested in being a co-founder.

Demo Presenter Information

Nelson (http://nelsonko.com) is the CEO/founder of Citadel Rock Online Communities Inc., providing solutions for online collaboration using wikis, social networking and multimedia messaging. He is an active contributor to the TikiWiki (http://tikiwiki.org) open source project. Nelson has held positions in Hewlett-Packard and Singapore Telecom, and architected solutions brought to market across the world for companies such as Trans World International Interactive and Telstra. He holds an M.A. Economics degree from the University of Toronto, and is currently working on a dissertation "Building intellectual and social capital in online knowledge communities" in the M.A.Sc. Technology Innovation Management program (http://carleton.ca/tim) at Carleton University.