The current version of XoWiki supports additional web 2.0
functionality to provide improved group awareness. The new functionality
comprises of two parts:
- Social Network Analysis:
XoWiki is now capable to analyze the collaboration structures of
of an XoWiki instance. The basic assumption is that two people
work together, when they edit the same content item. The more frequent people
edit the same item, the stronger they work together.
Based on this assumption, XoWiki computes two different graphs- The collaboration network of a single user:
This graph displays the structure with which other users a certain user works
together (which other users have contributed to the items, the
certain user has contributed to). This is a personal contribution
point of view.
The following page shows my collaboration graph on openacs.org:
http://www.openacs.org/xowiki/collab?user_id=143022 - The recent activity graph:
The activity graph shows recent changes in an XoWiki instance and
computes the teams working on recent items. This view takes the
n most recent contributions and computes the collaboration structure
in this network.
The following page displays the recent activity graph of the xowiki instance at openacs.org:
http://www.openacs.org/xowiki/activity
The graphs are computed in JavaScript and displayed by a an
improved version of
http://ajaxian.com/archives/new-javascriptcanvas-graph-library
(MIT style license) which is using the canvas element
(http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Canvas_tutorial). I have
fixed some placement problems and improved configurability by
being able to provide the weight and width of edges.
The canvas widget can be used in theory on the Internet explorer
with a Google-contributed emulation of the canvas widget (Apache
license). However, while i was able to see the edges in simple
configuration on IE as well, it refuses to draw edges in the
actual implementation. It was already quite nasty to get the
initialization working in the right order with the YAHOO event
library, but this problem should be fixed by now. I would
appreciate some help from a person experienced with JavaScript and
IE to fix this issue. - The collaboration network of a single user:
- Time-line analysis:
The contribution display of a user gives in addition to the
collaboration structure a history of the contributions of this
user. These contributions are displayed with the Ajax
time-line widget from the SIMILE project:
http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/ (distributed under a BSD style license)
The mentioned JavaScript libraries are included in the XoWiki package
in CVS head. I will summarize the recent changes in XoWiki in a separate
posting. I'll try to provide a more detailed description on the forthcoming
OpenACS and DotLRN conference in Vienna (http://oacs-dotlrn-conf2007.wu-wien.ac.at/)
As for all my other xowiki contributions, my work is available under a MIT style license (like XOTcl).
Gustaf Neumann
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