The Visual Wiki: A New Metaphor for Knowledge Access and Management

Abstract

The rapid growth of the World Wide Web as a platform to produce and consume information has brought with it new opportunities and new challenges for the ubiquitous and exponentially growing issue of information overload. Recent advances in technologies, applications, and interaction behavior provide many different approaches for dealing with this issue. Some of these approaches include visual user interfaces for more effcient interactions and methods for collaborative information organization. In this thesis, we introduce the novel concept of the "Visual Wiki". This concept describes a specifc type of web-based information management application, which combines the notions of textual and visual representations of information, either of which may be editable in a collaborative way. After formalizing the Visual Wiki concept and placing it into the context of the Web as an information processing environment, we describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of four example Visual Wikis. These examples cover a diverse set of problem domains and allow for a discussion of the benefits and potential of the Visual Wiki concept. We continue by generalizing common architectural features and building blocks from those examples, specifying a visual language capable of describing Visual Wikis, and presenting the design and proof-of-concept implementation of a Visual Wiki meta-tool which supports end-users in modeling and automatically generating new Visual Wiki instances. An evaluation of the meta-tool demonstrates its strengths and weaknesses. This research is based on a sound theoretical foundation, exemplified by a wide range of applications, and is generalized within the meta-tool. We thus successfully demonstrate the concept of the Visual Wiki as a new metaphor for knowledge access and management.