Purple%20MediaWiki:%20Fine-Grained%20Addressability%20of%20Wiki%20Content

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Purple MediaWiki Fine-Grained Addressability of
Wiki Content

• Ken Baclawski, Viral Gupta,
• Tejas Parikh
• Northeastern University
• Peter P. Yim, Jonathan Cheyer
• CIM Engineering

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Motivation

• Web content has evolved from small static pages
  to large, dynamically evolving documents.
• Wikis foster large-scale, complex collaboration
  projects involving geographically distributed
  communities.
• Fine-grained addressability of content has many
  uses
• High-resolution hypertext links
• More usable bookmarks
• Inclusion of parts of documents in other
  documents
• Annotation of specific parts of documents
• Organizing discussions and negotiations

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Outline

• Examples of fine-grained addressability
• Introduction to Purple Numbers
• Purple MediaWiki
• Features
• Architecture
• Design
• Related work
• Plans for the future

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Examples of Fine-Grained Addressability

• US Patents
• Line numbers
• Identifiers for elements of diagrams
• Scientific research papers
• Government and corporate archives
• Standards documents

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History of Purple Numbers

• Doug Engelbarts oNLine System (NLS) in 1968
  Mother of All Demos
• Precision browsing added in the mid-1990s by
  Christina Engelbart
• Statement numbers are now called Purple
  Numbers because of their color.
• Frode Hegland introduced link information and
  made purple numbers active elements in 2000.

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Examples of Purple Numbers
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Successes

• US Government standards development effort
• 300 documents
• 585 participants in 8 teams
• 5 workshops
• Completed development in 6 months
• Ontolog Forum
• Over 500 members from over 30 countries
• Very widely used (more than 1.5M hits/month and
  120K visits/month)

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Purple MediaWiki (PMWX)

• Purple numbers for MediaWiki
• Two kinds of purple number
• Hierarchical identifier (HID)
• Stateless/Dynamic
• Regenerated as page is rendered
• Node identifier (NID)
• Stateful/Persistent
• Permanently associated with each node
• Viewspec Hiding Purple Numbers

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Combining HIDs and NIDs
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PMWX in Action

• http//project.cim3.net/wiki/PMWX

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PMWX System Architecture
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Reference Implementation

• HIDs and NIDs use server-side PHP
• Viewspec uses client-side JavaScript
• Class diagram

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Related Work

• XLink, XPointer and XPath
• Purple
• Plink
• PurpleSlurple
• PurpleWiki
• Purple numbering on blogs
• HyperScope

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Future Work

• Reference implementation of transclusion
• Transclusion by HID and NID
• Transclusion using XPath expressions
• Migration from existing Purple Number wikis
• Applications that build on Purple Numbers
• Semantic wikis based on RDF and OWL
• Fine-grained folksonomic tagging

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Conclusion

• Fine-grained addressability is frequently used in
  many contexts, both traditional and online media.
• There have been many successful applications of
  Purple Numbers.
• Lack of integration with popular tools such as
  MediaWiki has limited the popularity of Purple
  Numbers.
• Introducing fine-grained addressability to
  MediaWiki will make important capabilities
  available to a much larger number of
  collaborative project environments.