| As the core of scientific development, knowledge innovation has become the essential impetus for economic growth and social development. Digital research environment, characterized by its openness, cooperativeness and shareability, is the prerequisite for knowledge innovation and provides the basis for innovative works in universities and research institutions. Web 2.0-based Wiki system supports network collaboration and has obvious advantages in information sharing and knowledge innovation. Therefore, application of Wiki technology in academic field, such as constructing integrated Wiki platform for academic community, can become an indispensable part of digital research environment to promote academic knowledge innovation.From a user-centric point of view, this dissertation presented a systematic analysis of the impact of Wiki on knowledge innovation, with the focus on construction of academic Wiki platform. Various aspects of platform construction, including platform technology, content management, and community construction, have been discussed in detail. The dissertation has six chapters, with 150,000 words,60 figures and 12 tables.In the first chapter, we reviewed the fundamental theory and technology of Wiki. The ultimate impetus of the development of Wiki is attributed to the concept of open source, social software and the changes in information sharing pattern. At technical level, Wiki is composed of four essential elements:contents, templates, Wiki engines and pages, with basic functions such as creating links, locking pages, revision control and sandbox testing etc. As a web application software, Wiki is characterized by its unique markup language and online revision management, which supports multiple end users editing Wiki pages cooperatively. Although no innovative technologies have been adopted by Wiki, the integration of these technologies develops concepts of freedom, openness, sharing and cooperativeness, which revolutionizes the traditional patterns of knowledge production and information organization and embodies the long tail effect of knowledge production. Moreover, as a system with dissipative structure and synergistic effect, the contents of Wiki are ordered mainly through self-organization rather than hetero-organization. From the appearance of WikiWikiWeb in 1995, various editions of Wiki engine have been developed, which promote the maturity and visibility of Wiki system, as well as the application of Wiki in many fields. Compared to overseas, Wiki is developing at a relatively slow pace in China, and is now entering the stage of diversification development.The connection between Wiki and academic knowledge innovation was analyzed in chapter two. Academic knowledge innovation is mainly about the knowledge innovating activities in universities and research institutions, which is classified as the professional knowledge innovation and consisted of two stages including knowledge creation and knowledge application. Knowledge communication and sharing, which is transformed from traditional pattern to network pattern with a trend of interaction and cooperativeness, is the premise of academic knowledge innovation; the intrinsic needs of interdisciplinary research and the external impetus of generation and application of new network technologies is also driving the transformation of the pattern of academic knowledge innovation. Compared with the other network cooperative tools such as Blogs, P2P and collaborative recommendation systems, Wiki has special advantages in supporting the academic knowledge innovation. Firstly, Wiki advocates the concept of group wisdom and collaborative creation, which is in accordance with the idea of knowledge synergy. Secondly, Wiki uses the mechanism of knowledge linking, which is characterized by self-organization and nonlinearity, to promote the construction of knowledge network. Thirdly, Wiki platform can be viewed as a space or a location with sharing and participative architecture for implementation of brainstorming in network environment. Fourthly, the Wiki users can spontaneously form various scientific communities focusing on the problems of common interests, which promotes the efficiency of knowledge innovation. According to the knowledge flow and the process of knowledge innovation activities, we divided the Wiki-based academic knowledge innovation into four categories:knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, knowledge integration and knowledge feedback.The system technical aspect of academic Wiki platform was discussed in chapter three. Wiki system provides the basis for user collaboration, content organization and storage. Based on the analysis of objective requirements, and the evaluation of the popular Wiki engines, we intended to select the suitable open source Wiki engines to construct academic Wiki platform.However, most knowledge and information in traditional Wiki systems is described in natural languages, which lacks structure to support reusing and structured information retrieval, and is difficult to be effectively managed and utilized by users.Combining semantic web technologies such as RDF, OWL, topic map and concept map with traditional Wiki system, through the way of semantic annotation, can highly efficiently realize content retrieval, navigation, and integration. Nowadays, semantic Wiki is a hot issue in Wiki research overseas, several prototype systems, including Platypus Wiki, IkeWiki, WikSAR, SemperWiki, Semantic MediaWiki, etc, are under development, which have the common characteristics such as typing/annotating of links, context-aware presentation, enhanced navigation, semantic search, and reasoning support, etc. Integrating the semantic plug-in into Wiki platform can easily implement the simple functions of semantic retrieval through semantic annotation of the content, but still has problems such as the inconsistent description of links types and attributes, and the ambiguity of semantic information. To address such issues, we proposed a semantic model based on domain knowledge element ontology, in an attempt to integrate controlled semantic into Wiki system, and to expand and optimize the semantic function of academic Wiki platform through the core modules of human-computer interaction, knowledge element extraction, semantic map generation and reasoning support. Besides, the academic Wiki platform can also integrate RSS and Tag technologies to provide personalized service for users.The content management of academic Wiki platform was discussed in chapter four. Maintaining the high quality of items in Wiki knowledge base along with the growth in quantity, is crucial for the healthy and consistent development of academic Wiki platform. Based on the analysis of content management strategies adopted by the common Wiki platforms such as Wikipedia and Baidupedia, and combined with the practice of academic field, we proposed several tactics for content management. Firstly, read/write control of content is based on authority management. Academic Wiki platform has target user groups that focus on different research topics. In order to meet users’special needs for professional content organization, restrictive access, and independent audit, we selected the model of Role Based Access Control (RBAC) to construct the framework of the academic Wiki platform and to implement the authority management to control read/write of content. Secondly, content copyrights are protected based on open authorization protocols. We overviewed the concepts and essentials of the Copyleft, and discussed the compatibility and platform applicability of the major open authorization protocols. By adopting these accepted open authorization protocols such as GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons, academic Wiki platform can not only clearly determine the authorships in the network environment but also reduce the costs of knowledge producing and enrich available public resource, which in turn promotes knowledge sharing and innovation. Thirdly, the promotion of content quality is based on the related rules. The contents of Wiki knowledge base belong to public web-based academic resources which can be accessed publicly via Internet from anywhere. Referring to the standards of web information evaluation, we proposed standards on the accuracy, timeliness, objectivity, and integrity of Wiki platform contents, in order to keep its high quality.Chapter five focuses on the aspect of community construction. Stimulating the enthusiasm of participants and sustaining the persistent knowledge sharing and innovation activity is the only way to keep the academic Wiki platform running normally. Based on the communication activity, knowledge level and expression capability, community users can be assigned different roles such as leader, supporter, browser, and interrupter etc, with the aim of transforming the Wiki community users from knowledge consumer to producer. Based on Bandura’s social cognitive theory and from the aspects of community environment and user cognitive, we identified several factors that influence the knowledge sharing activity of community users, which includes the technical mechanism of academic Wiki community, organization culture, self-efficacy of user knowledge sharing activity, and outcome expectancy of knowledge sharing activity of community users. We further proposed a series of measures to promote users’knowledge sharing behavior, such as optimizing information technology facilities, introducing effective incentive mechanisms, and developing cultural atmosphere for knowledge sharing. In addition, trust is the critical issue of community construction, and is relative to users’reputation. The user reputation evaluation system adopts either a user-based or a content-based model and generally consists of three modules including events monitoring, index analysis, and application strategy. Based on the general model and common framework, and combined with the characteristics of Wiki system, we proposed a new reputation evaluation system named user-content driven model, aiming at developing a better trust environment to encourage Wiki users to contribute high quality content persistently.In chapter six, OpenWetWare and WikiGenes were selected for case studies of academic Wiki platform. From a technical and functional viewpoint, we discussed the promotion and support effects of these two Wiki platforms in their respective academic fields.Besides,we also summarized the characteristics and limitations of the chosen academic Wiki platforms, and pinpointed the problems waiting to be solved.In the end, we summarized the limitations of our research and pointed out the perspectives of application of academic Wiki platform in knowledge innovation. This dissertation presented the major research achievements of project "Research on Wiki-based knowledge sharing and innovation service system", which is supported by the National Philosophy and Social Sciences Foundation (Grant No.07BTQ012). |
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