My thesis is focused on assessment of evolution of knowledge management systems and specifically on deployment of wiki technology for knowledge management in consulting company Efficio ltd.

O controle de versões é uma das principais funcionalidades do Gerenciamento de Configuração de Software (GCS) e visa, entre outras coisas, a recuperação e auditoria (quem, quando e o quê) de versões anteriores e a redução do espaço de armazenamento dos produtos em desenvolvimento. Existem ferramentas que auxiliam esse controle - o CVS (Concurrent Versions System) é uma delas e tem sido amplamente adotado. Como apoio à edição colaborativa na Web, o CVS pode proporcionar benefícios no sentido de recuperar e verificar versões anteriores. Atualmente, ferramentas conhecidas como “wiki”, que possibilitam edição colaborativa por meio da Web, têm obtido muitos adeptos. Um exemplo desse tipo de ferramenta é a CoTeia, que tem sido utilizada no ambiente acadêmico do Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação (ICMC) da Universidade de São Paulo (USP) desde 2001, e vem sendo utilizada também, integrada à ferramenta DocRationale, usada para registro do Design Rationale (DR). Além da edição colaborativa, é possível também o armazenamento de arquivos (uploads) associados às páginas Web da wiki. A ferramenta DocRationale viabiliza o armazenamento de artefatos relacionados ao processo de desenvolvimento de software, através do upload de arquivos. No entanto, o controle de versões desses artefatos na CoTeia não era provido. De fato, não existe um consenso da literatura a respeito do suporte de controle de versões em áreas de upload nas wikis. Neste trabalho foi realizado um estudo para análise do uso de controle de versões nas páginas e nos uploads em um conjunto de wikis pesquisadas. Já na DocRationale, como os artefatos são alterados durante o processo de desenvolvimento de software, o controle de versões na CoTeia se torna um mecanismo importante. Com isso, foi implementado o controle de versões dos artefatos armazenados na ferramenta DocRationale, através da integração do CVS à CoTeia utilizada na DocRationale. / Versions Control is one of the main activities of Software Configuration Management (SCM) and aims, among other goals, the previous versions retrieval and auditing (who, when and what), and the reduction of storage space required by under development products. There are tools that help this control – CVS is one of these and has been widely adopted. As a support to web collaborative editing, CVS can provide benefits by retrieving and checking previous versions. Nowadays, the tools known as wiki, which allow web collaborative editions, have been gathered many adopters. An example of this kind of tool is CoTeia, that has been used in academic environment at Institute of Mathematics Science and Computing (ICMC) of University of São Paulo (USP) since 2001. CoTeia has also been used integrated to DocRationale tool, which is used to register design rationale. Besides the collaborative editing, CoTeia also permits the file uploads related to wiki webpages. DocRationale makes possible artifacts storage related to software development process, through file uploads. However, versions control of the artifacts in CoTeia was not provided. Indeed, in literature there is not a consensus about the versions control support in uploads wiki area. The present dissertation shows an analysis of versions control usage on pages and uploads areas of a set of selected wikis. On the other hand, in DocRationale, because the artifacts can be changed during all the software development process, the versions control in CoTeia becomes an important mechanism. For this reason, versions control of artifacts stored in DocRationale was implemented, through integration of CVS to CoTeia used in DocRationale.

Studierende von zwei verschiedenen Universitäten erforschen gemeinsam ein konkretes Thema. Ihre Forschungsergebnisse diskutieren, veranschaulichen und überarbeiten sie in einem Wiki. Diesen Weg des forschenden Lernens verfolgte das Projekt Exegese- WerkstattWiki, das an den theologischen Instituten der TU Dresden und der Universität Leipzig durchgeführt wurde.

Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht mithilfe einer systematischen Literaturrecherche, welche Faktoren die Zusammenarbeit in Wikis in der Hochschullehre hemmen und welche Gestaltungsmaßnahmen geeignet sind, um die Zusammenarbeit zu fördern. Die identifizierten Gestaltungsmaßnahmen werden anschließend in die Phasen des Referenzmodells zur Einführung eines E-Learning-Angebots nach DIN PAS 1032-1:2004 eingeordnet. Somit bietet dieser Beitrag Lehrenden eine praxistaugliche Handlungsempfehlung zur Planung und Durchführung kollaborativer Wiki-Arbeit in der Hochschullehre.

Sowohl für Wissenswikis als auch Intranetwikis sind folgende Leitfragen zu klären: Wie und wer definiert die Inhaltsstruktur für das Enterprise Wiki? Wie kann der Nutzer selbst einen Überblick behalten und sicherstellen, dass die relevanten Informationen ankommen? Die Inhalte eines Wikis sind nicht unstrukturiert! Die Anwender bilden eine gewisse Struktur über Schlagworte und Seitenhierarchien. Zusätzlich bringt eine Gliederung in Wiki-Bereichen die notwendige Erststruktur und die erstellte Inhaltsübersichten die notwendige Transparenz.

Data generation has vastly exceeded manual annotation in several areas of astronomy, biology, economy, geology, medicine and physics. At the same time, a public community of experts and hobbyists has developed around some of these disciplines thanks to open, editable web resources such as wikis and public annotation challenges. In this thesis I investigate under which conditions a combination of collaborative and automated curation could complete annotation tasks unattainable by human curators alone. My exemplar curation process is taken from the molecular biology domain: the association all existing enzymes (proteins catalysing a chemical reaction) with their function. Assigning enzymatic function to the proteins in a genome is the first essential problem of metabolic reconstruction, important for biology, medicine, industrial production and environmental studies. In the protein database UniProt, only 3% of the records are currently manually curated and only 60% of the 17 million recorded proteins have some functional annotation, including enzymatic annotation. The proteins in UniProt represent only about 380,000 animal species (2,000 of which have completely sequenced genomes) out of the estimated millions of species existing on earth. The enzyme annotation task already applies to millions of entries and this number is bound to increase rapidly as sequencing efforts intensify. To guide my analysis I first develop a basic model of collaborative curation and evaluate it against molecular biology knowledge bases. The analysis highlights a surprising similarity between open and closed annotation environments on metrics usually connected with “democracy” of content. I then develop and evaluate a method to enhance enzyme function annotation using machine learning which demonstrates very high accuracy, recall and precision and the capacity to scale to millions of enzyme instances. This method needs only a protein sequence as input and is thus widely applicable to genomic and metagenomic analysis. The last phase of the work uses active and guided learning to bring together collaborative and automatic curation. In active learning a machine learning algorithm suggests to the human curators which entry should be annotated next. This strategy has the potential to coordinate and reduce the amount of manual curation while improving classification performance and reducing the number of training instances needed. This work demonstrates the benefits of combining classic machine learning and guided learning to improve the quantity and quality of enzymatic knowledge and to bring us closer to the goal of annotating all existing enzymes.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Wikis have been found to be an easy-to-use, low-cost, and Internet-based technology useful in creating and mobilizing knowledge. Wikis hosted within firms (corporate wikis) have become a popular way for employees to share information and collaborate. Preliminary research suggested that as few as 6% of wiki consumers contributed to the development of wiki pages. Conventional approaches argued that employees judged the costs of participating in wikis (e.g., authoring or changing material, reading messages, following an argument, and posting responses) to exceed the benefits of participating in wikis (e.g., recognition, reputation etc.) - thus many people "lurked" but did not post. Considering that people contemplated perceived benefits with costs of participating in wikis, research emphasized the cognitive aspects of decision-making. The emotional aspects of wiki participation in firms have received little research attention. Yet, research in other fields such as law, economics, and health showed that emotions played a critical role in human decision making, where feelings were shown to outweigh contemplated costs and benefits. For example, Kiviniemi, Voss-Humke, and Siefert (2007) found that positive feelings about exercise resulted in more physical activity whereas positive feelings about food resulted in unhealthy food choices. For Wikipedia, a public wiki, studies suggested that emotion might be an important motivator in participation. The purpose of this research was to study the role of emotion in corporate wiki participation. Since the area of research is new, the contextual details of wikis in an organizational setting made it difficult for a researcher to separate the context from the main effects. A grounded theory approach was needed. Under grounded theory, one starts with the data and builds arguments or theories from the "ground up." This study used a grounded theory methodology to reveal data through interviews, employee journals, observations, wiki statistics, and other documentation. Data were analyzed on a continuum using grounded theory coding to identify codes, categories, concepts, and properties and to recognize relationships among concepts. An exploration of emotion in an organizational context resulted in theories that provided an important beginning to understanding wiki experiences and improving wiki outcomes.

Web 2.0 tools, namely blogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS were introduced to change teaching practices of in-service high school teachers to improve the collaboration of today's students in the English language classroom. Two high school teachers of English language and their classes participated. The teachers were interviewed about their current teaching practices and provided with training to develop teaching units that use Web 2.0 to engage students as active collaborators in their learning. They integrated blogs, podcasts, wikis, and RSS into their teaching. Additional interviews were conducted during and after the implementation stage. Implementation strategies, changes in teaching practices, challenges encountered, and the impact on student interaction and collaboration were closely examined. Students were surveyed at the conclusion. Teachers found that Web 2.0 tools made them more efficient in teaching. Blogging was the most powerful tool for journal writing and sharing ideas. Wikis were more difficult to use but were useful to facilitate group planning and collaborative construction of knowledge. Podcasts were useful for publishing audio recordings of interviews, speeches, and poetry recitals. RSS feeds made it easy for teachers and students to track updates on websites, posts on blogs, collaborations on wikis, and audio recordings on podcasts. Both teachers and students enjoyed the interactions and collaboration that took place in the English classroom using Web 2.0 tools.

Web 2.0 was a phrase coined in 2004 to describe the characteristics of web sites which survived the original Dot-com crash. Despite the discussion of this phenomenon in a wide variety of both academic and mass media sources, itʼs exact definition remains unclear. The relative contributions of technology and social participation to this phenomenon are particularly confused. The primary aim of this research report is to provide a clear and comprehensive definition of Web 2.0. This definition is determined through a combined social and technological analysis of blogs, wikis and social network sites, through their particular manifestations in Boing Boing, Wikipedia and Facebook respectively. It is the finding of this research that Web 2.0 is primarily the result of a natural evolution from Web 1.0 technologies and attitudes, and that Web 2.0 is essentially a social phenomenon. This research provides separate definitions for Web 2.0 technologies and Web 2.0 platforms. A Web 2.0 technology is any technology that aids and encourages simple intuitive user interaction through an architecture of participation. These technologies enable user feedback, and are thus constantly improved and exist within the ethos of a perpetual beta. Web 2.0 technologies embrace re-mix and mash-up philosophies. A Web 2.0 platform is a read-write Web platform designed to enable and encourage User Generated Content and interaction. These platforms can be built with any set of technologies, and their primary characteristics are social in nature, but the platforms must allow users to interact with the technology at either an open-source, network or appropriation level. These platforms become more powerful and richer the greater the number of people using the platform, and ultimately result in the formation of Web 2.0 communities.