Revising the OpenMath 3 Content Dictionaries with SWiM
The semantic wiki SWiM is now being used for the revision of the OpenMath 3 Content Dictionaries. The wiki at wiki.openmath.org contains the latest draft versions of these content dictionaries. Anybody can browse and discuss. The OpenMath 3 developers can also edit. This paper explains how the system works.
The purpose of this case study is twofold:
- supporting the OpenMath developers with a tool that is more advanced than accessing the OpenMath Subversion repository with a text or XML editor
- evaluating how well SWiM helps the OpenMath developers to get common tasks done: revising symbol and notation definitions, updating metadata of content dictionaries and symbol definitions, discussing about improvements of the content dictionaries, keeping track of what has been done to what part of a content dictionary, by whom, and why.
Challenges:
- capturing the workflows of OpenMath content dictionary editing and supporting them
- motivating the OpenMath developers to actually use the wiki interface by pointing out the benefits
- seamless and lossless data exchange between the wiki and the Subversion repository
Currently (May 2009):
- porting SWiM to a new technical basis, as the current one is obsolete and certain wishes of users cannot be fulfilled within the existing system
Successes:
So far:
- all OpenMath CDs editable in the wiki
- OpenMath developers started to adopt the discussion and argumentation features
Lessons learned:
(in progress; preliminary results)
Reference:
Partner institution:
