ThinkFree: Using a Visual Wiki for IT Knowledge Management in a Tertiary Institution

Track: Industry track
Authors: Christian Hirsch, John Hosking, John Grundy and Tim Chaffe

Abstract
We describe ThinkFree, an industrial Visual Wiki application which provides a way for end users to better explore knowledge of IT Enterprise Architecture assets that is held within a large enterprise wiki. The application was motivated by the difficulty users were facing navigating and understanding enterprise architecture information in a large corporate wiki. ThinkFree provides a graph based interactive visualization of IT assets which are described using the Freebase semantic wiki. It is used to visualize relationships between those assets and navigate between them. We describe the motivation for the development of ThinkFree, its design and implementation. Our experiences in corporate rollout of the application are discussed, together with the strengths of weaknesses of the approach we have taken and lessons learned from ThinkFree’s development and deployment.

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