Re: Wiki Classification Schemes [Was: Page rename crashed second time around]

Murray: ah yes Sushi (sigh) great stuff :-)
Just saw your post after answering Dirk.
In short I just want to have some way of keeping track of what I am doing as
the number of pages grow and I am not sure that i trust that a search will
make the right page pop up.

thus I have been poking around Multiwikis and categories and namespaces and
i assume that it's all about trade offs....

Will copy my answer to him here as well:
Dirk  wrote:
"

Due to the absence of a hierarchical folder concept in JSPWiki, I am using
extensively a dot syntax to group related pages together. (similar to the
java package concept) Therefore, I needed a way to generate Index pages of a
subset of wiki pages, based on a certain Namespace or page prefix.


"
Perhaps I am using the wrong plugin. The Namespace Index Plugin seems to
give me what I want.
But I still need to test it.

The multiple categories is a good second choice if I cant get the
NamespaceIndex Plugin to work.
To have to remember to add a link on each page is a bit of a strain on the
old memory. If I forget to add a link to a page, that page can be easily
forgotten. For me, its easier to attach the category as a name
Zoo.Birds.Stork

I am assuming that this prefix (Zoo.Birds.Stork) would not be included in
the name right? If it is, then it seems that the only difference between
using this plugin and the first one is the fact that a link is no longer
needed at the end of each page? Is this assumption correct?

I tried adding the text to the EditTemplate.jsp and ViewTemplate.jsp  but
the link did not get generated as I had hoped.  I could really use a
suggestion as to which to use. - Show quoted text -


On 8/1/07, Murray Altheim <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Claudia Frers wrote:
> > Thx Dirk ..that was the idea but i was concerned about the long names
> needed
> > to achieve this goal...but i  guess that  there is no  "better" way.
>
> Claudia,
>
> It's common on wikis (absent any alternative) to attempt to overload
> the wiki page name with classification information, especially given
> that we typically have a flat namespace (i.e., all names exist within
> the same context or scope; another way to put it is that the scope
> is undefined).
>
> There are two ways to deal with this:
>
>    1. come up with a wiki page naming scheme, publish it, and then
>       conform to it (and get all the wiki's users to conform as well)
>
>    2. stop using wiki page names for categorisation
>
> Obviously the second is a more compelling approach, but the native
> wiki solution of creating "Category*" links is similarly problematic,
> as it has again a flat namespace.
>
> There's a number of good books on library categorisation that I could
> recommend, suffice it to say that there are many types of categorisation.
> The most compelling of them is called Faceted Classification (FC), where
> rather than enumerate a set of classes or categories, they are created
> not by naming them but synthetically through the combination of what
> are called "facets" (properties, characteristics, attributes, etc.).
>
> So that rather than create an enumerated classification called e.g.,
> "Extinct American Blue Butterflies" one would simply assign facets
> to the entity such as "Extinct", "American", "Butterfly", "Blue", with
> each of those facets (in 'classical" FC) being part of a hierarchy of
> facets (e.g., "American" would be in a hierarchy of Place, "Blue" in
> a hierarchy of physical properties, etc.). A search via facets would
> produce a result set of all those entities having those assigned
> facets. An advantage here is that if a given set of entities gets too
> large it's always possible to create more facets to further differen-
> tiate them, unlike an enumerated classification where fitting 5000
> more entities between 299.514 and 299.515 might get problematic. With
> FC it's not an issue. The facets are referred to by name, and are
> drawn from a fixed set, called a "controlled vocabulary".
>
> But even with a controlled vocabulary, the problem *again* is that
> using names to identify facets we are still working within a flat
> namespace. "American" is both a colloquial term for people from the
> USA and the name of a hemisphere, "Blue" is both a colour and an
> emotion, etc.  There are ways around that to create namespaces or
> enumerate facets, but not simple ways, and any enumeration harks
> back to similar problems. The issue of what's called "subject
> identity" is actually very subtle and complex, and commonly over-
> simplified in most systems (including the "Semantic Web" world of
> OWL and Description Logics).
>
> Because most wiki users are not trained ontological engineers (who
> are hardly immune to making profound mistakes and designing flawed
> systems), we can either attempt to design and enforce a controlled
> vocabulary as well as train our users in its proper usage (a
> decidedly difficult or intractable task) or discard the very idea of
> linguistic formality in favour of by-design informal system. That's
> kinda what tags and folksonomies attempt to do, and there's been a
> ton of work done in recent years, mostly by people with no background
> whatsoever in epistemology, computational linguistics, knowledge
> representation, formal ontological systems, or similarly daunting
> fields. Lacking that knowledge we end up with very similar problems
> cropping up.
>
> So what to do?
>
> I can't claim to have any solution for certain, but I've been working
> on one for awhile now. It involves FC, "informal logical assertions",
> and it's completely untested on a population of users. It's also not
> available yet. But when it is, it will be compatible with (i.e.,
> functionally based on) JSPWiki.
>
> Suffice it to say this is hardly a simple issue, but it is one that
> libraries have been dealing with effectively for a very long time.
>
> Not sure if this was helpful, me just burning off some energy from a
> very good sushi dinner... mmm
>
> Murray
>
>
> ...........................................................................
> Murray Altheim <murray07 at altheim.com>                           ===  =
> =
> http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     =
> =  ===
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