Markup Free Auto Linking Wiki

By markup-free, auto-linking Wiki, I mean a Wiki that has the traditional auto-linking features, except that there are no such things as WikiWords or internal link markup (sometimes called a FreeLink). Instead, this Wiki would rely on an ontology to detect words that should be linked. {nid 22J}

For example, if "collaborative tools" were a concept you wanted in your Wiki, instead of creating the equivalent WikiWord or FreeLink, you would define this as a term in your ontology. The next time "collaborative tools" were mentioned on a Wiki page, the Wiki would create the appropriate link. {nid 22K}

This has the following benefits: {nid 22L}

• When you explicitly add a term to your ontology, that term essentially becomes a first-class concept in your Wiki. The way it's done right now, you would have to track every instance of that term in the Wiki and convert it manually into a WikiWord. {nid 22M}
• You could add synonyms and other relationships, and the Wiki would link it in a way that makes sense. For example, you could add "tools for collaboration" and define that as a synonym to "collaborative tools." The Wiki could then either link all references to "tools for collaboration" to the page entitled, "collaborative tools," or it could create a new page and create a synonym link between them. You could also define "collaborative tool" as a singular version of "collaborative tools," and have the same linking effect as described above. {nid 22N}
• It resolves a usability issues with both WikiWords and FreeLink""s. When I refer to people in my blog, I call them by their full name (e.g. ChrisDent). I'm changing the way I talk in order to conform to a tool. At times, I'd rather just say "Chris" and have that work properly. Another example: Sometimes, I want to say "ThinkOutLoud," while others I want to say "ThinkingOutLoud." I don't want to have to create separate pages for every different variation on this term, and I don't want to rewrite sentences to conform to one version of this term. {nid 241}

Challenges: {nid 24U}

• What does the parser do when it sees "Chris," checks the ontology, and sees that "Chris" is a synonym for both "Chris Dent" and "Christine Peterson"? Presumably, it links to both, and offers the user the opportunity to resolve the ambiguity. This also means that the markup should be modified to specify the identifier of the correct concept in this particular case. {nid 24V}

Acknowledgements {nid 22O}

These ideas came up again while I was having coffee with DoraiThodla (August 7, 2004), which inspired me to write them down. The "collaborative tools"/"tools for collaboration" example is Dorai's. {nid 22P}

There are two tools, one of which predates Wikis, that were initial experiments to this effect. The first is KenShan's huhebi. The other is ChrisDent's Warp. {nid 22Q}

Many conversations with JackPark about ontologies helped prime my thinking in this direction. {nid 22R}