Feb 12 2009
The KiWi’s New Clothes & KiWi Linked Data
KiWi’s New Clothes. As you might be aware of, we had a KiWi user interface meeting two weeks ago where Josef Holy (Sun), Werner Moser (SRFG) and I were working together on redesigning the KiWi user interface and user interaction. The result has been a set of storyboard sketches that showed various screens of the upcoming KiWi system.
Now, two weeks later, we have been able to realise the new layout and some of the storyboards in the live KiWi system. The KiWi has new clothes, and they look really cool (thanks for the design, Werner)! Here are two screenshots of my development system; I will try to setup a new showcase system as soon as possible:
The new wiki page presentation. In the header, you have access to the KiWi applications that are registered using the new extension mechanism (currently: Wiki, TagIT, Admin, Inspector). The black toolbar gives quick access to last visited pages (“breadcrumps”) and to login/logout functionality. Search has also been placed in the header.
As you can see, the old Mediawiki-style tabbed navigation between action panels has been removed in favour of a “action menu”, because 95% of wiki users are readers and do not edit. The right-hand widgets have been visually integrated as part of the page, because they display context information while the left column displays navigation.
The KiWi administration interface (currently still under heavy development). It uses a layout similar to the wiki page presentation, but the main area consists of only a single column.
TagIT in the new KiWi layout. As you can see, TagIT fits very nicely with the new design and looks quite professional.
Linked Open Data. Also in the news: KiWi can now act as a Linked Open Data server. This means that all wiki pages (content items) that KiWi creates itself have RDF URIs that resolve to the hosting KiWi system. When accessing such a URI with a linked data browser, the KiWi system returns the RDF fragment that is relevant for the content item.
Extension Mechanism. The last major improvement this week is the realisation of the KiWi extension mechanism, which allows to modularise the system into more independent components. KiWi currently distinguishes between four different kinds of extensions:
- Applications (like the Wiki or TagIT) are separate applications building on top of the KiWi core system and come with their own set of components, services, JSF files, and page flow definitions (Seam pages.xml).
- Services are bundles of service components that provide certain functionalities to the rest of the system. Typical services might be an “ontology service” that provides more high-level methods for modifying various kinds of ontologies in the system or a “recommendation service” that allows to compute recommendations based on the currently active context (current page, current user, current application)
- Actions are small extensions that add a certain action to content items like “Geolocate” or “PDF”. Actions are meant to hook into the action menu described in the user interface above (not yet implemented).
- Widgets are small user interface components that the user can insert into his dashboard. Examples might be “My Recommendations” or “My Tags” or similar (not yet implemented).
As you can see, KiWi is now progressing nicely. Further interesting developments are the revision service that now moves from the experimental phase into the testing phase, the improvements in the server-side clustering of geotags in the TagIT application, and some advancements in the administration.
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