VikiBuilder: end-user specification and generation of visual wikis

Abstract

With the need to make sense out of large and constantly growing information spaces, tools to support information management are becoming increasingly valuable. In prior work we proposed the "Visual Wiki" concept to describe and implement web-based information management applications. By focusing on the integration of two promising approaches, visualizations and collaboration tools, our Visual Wiki work explored synergies and demonstrated the value of the concept. Building on this, we introduce "VikiBuilder", a Visual Wiki meta-tool, which provides end-user supported modeling and automatic generation of Visual Wiki instances. We describe the design and implementation of the VikiBuilder including its architecture, a domain specific visual language for modeling Visual Wikis, and automatic generation of those. To demonstrate the utility of the tool, we have used it to construct a variety of different Visual Wikis. We describe the construction of Visual Wikis and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of our meta-tool approach.