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.
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.
Related: Social Network Analysis of TikiWiki
1 Comment
December 11, 2007 at 12:56 am
I never fill in the website section so thought I’d throw in the only substantial web-related thing I’m doing outside of work.
I was reading your blog and recall vaguely that someone was doing some sort of research into social networks on one of the sites. I watched some of the video clips (will watch them all when I can throw some headphones on) and while I don’t know a lot about social networking I find it fascinating. Plus I’ve seen it used on NUMB3RS.
I’m interested not only to learn more about it but to offer services to your WikiNetNav project. Not sure where I’d fit in, but I’ll help where I can.
I’m fairly good at php (check the cvs list for some of the stuff I’ve done), am the maintainer or record at the moment for the Tiki workflow tool, and have actually used some of the graphic features built into it php (though I suspect you’re using a third party lib).
Let me know what you’re looking for.
Mike.