ClassificationPlugin

Description

The ClassificationPlugin is a taxonomy and folksonomy extension for Foswiki that allows you to manage knowledge assets stored in your wiki. Users can organize their content by filing topics into categories and by adding offhand tags. Classifying content using categories and tags are the key factors to foster sustainable knowledge management. This becomes even more important in a wiki environment where content is created quickly but has to be made available for a longer period of time.

Categories become the backbone spanning all of your content. Content can then be retrieved by browsing categories narrowing down search results interactively in addition to the normal full-text search.

Key features

• Multilevel facet navigation: Wiki content is displayed dynamically by browsing a category tree or by means of interactive tag clouds.

• Managing taxonomies the wiki way: Categories in a taxonomy are first-class wiki citizens that can be created, renamed, managed and reused as easily as normal wiki topics.

• Expressive knowledge models: Categories may form poly-hierarchies where categories can have multiple parent categories. Wiki documents can be filed into multiple categories at the same time.

• Multidimensional classification: A wiki document may participate in multiple taxonomies and folksonomies at the same time. That way different facets of a document can be separated in a clean way.

• Reusing and merging taxonomies: A category tree once defined in one web space can be imported into another web space effortless. You are free to chose which part of a tree you want to import. Multiple category trees from a number of web spaces can be merged and reassembled differently in a new web. That way predefined taxonomies can be managed in a centralized way and reused as needed in different webs. Any change to a taxonomy in one place will automatically show up in all webs that imported it.

• Tagging for corporate intranets: While categories establish a predefined vocabulary, tags are a way to assign keywords to wiki content in an ad hoc fashion. This completes category knowledge management in a natural and fruitful way.

• Standardized WikiApplicatons: ClassificationPlugin conforms to the WikiWorkbench application framework that grants for scalable and long-term maintainable WikiApplications.

• Extensibility: ClassificationPlugin serves as a building block for further WikiApplications to be integrated in an overall knowledge management infrastructure. It serves as a middleware for a couple of higher order applications, like blogging, forums and skills management available separately.

• Document types: ClassificationPlugin adds a couple of document types to the standard set that come with the WikiWorkbench. This gives you maximum flexibility in your knowledge management initiative. Further document types can be derived with ease. These will automatically participate in the overall knowledge management framework.

• Related content: ClassificationPlugin uses meta data like categories and tags to compute a series of metrics among your wiki content, i.e. DISTANCE, SIMILARITY and ISA. These allow users to navigate among similar content by recommending nearby similar content. WikiApplication programmers can make use of semantic predicates to write next generation WikiApplications.

Screenshots

Syntax Rules

%HIERARCHY{...}%

Format strings may contain the following:

• $time expands to the calculated time difference
• %$ expands to a % char
• $$ expands to a $ char
• =

= expands to a linefeed

• $t expands to a tab space
• == expands to the empty string

ISA

Predicate that checks if a topic is filed in a specific category or one of its subcategories Also available in DBCacheContrib search expressions.

SUBSUMES

Predicate that checks if a category is a parent category of another. Also available in DBCacheContrib search expressions.

SIMILARTOPICS

Returns a list of topics that are similar to the current one. Similarity between two topics is a value expressed in percentage, where 100% means that the topics are extremely similar and 0% means that the compared topics aren't corelated at all. The similarity is computed on the base of the categorization and tagging information using a weighted matching coefficient.

Plugin Installation Instructions

• Download the ZIP file
• Unzip it in your wiki installation directory. Content:
• Visit configure in your wiki installation, and enable the plugin in the {Plugins} section.

Plugin Info

Plugin Author:	Michael Daum
Copyright ©:	2006-2009, Michael Daum http://michaeldaumconsulting.com
License:	GPL (GNU General Public License)
Plugin Version:	v0.81
Change History:
10 May 2009:	improved tagging widget using jquery.textboxlist
26 Mar 2009:	renamed TAGRELATEDTOPICS to SIMILARTOPICS; improved algorithm to compute similarity; various performance optimizations
12 Dec 2008:	disable memory cache by default
17 Jan 2008:	new TAGCOOCURRENCE; new HIERARCHY tag; Top category can be mapped onto a real topic now; new jquery.tagselector plugin; reworked view for topictypes making use of new MAKEINDEX of Foswiki:Extensions/FilterPlugin; added category and tag search; speedup for tag clouds
13 Nov 2007:	added semantic predicates ISA, SUBSUMES, COMPATIBLE to DBQUERY, fixed exclude parameter to cat formfield, fixed registering topics to Top category, rewrite of detecting which categories a TopicType has, normalized topic documentation according to WikiWorkbench standards, removed pagination in tag cloud selections, added support for displaying "recent" tags
30 Oct 2007:	first check-in to svn
30 Oct 2006:	Initial version
Dependency:	$Foswiki::Plugins::VERSION 1.1
CPAN Dependencies:
Other Dependencies:	none
Perl Version:	5.005
Plugin Home:	Foswiki:Extensions/ClassificationPlugin
Feedback:	Foswiki:Support/ClassificationPlugin