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. {nid 241}

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}