"The most di cult thing with ideas is not to have them. It's to nd out if they're good [1]." This position paper demonstrates the requirements for an idea management application and presents the idea management tool Ideator. The Ideator is a software tool which is currently under development and which o ers innovative and exible solutions to idea management in company environments. It is based on the semantic wiki KiWi that is a framework for semantic social software applications. We present several functionalities of the Ideator and show which modi cations and extensions of KiWi are necessary for their realisation.
Enterprise 2.0 Idea management
Since the existence of web2.0 sites like Facebook1, Flickr2 and Wikipedia3 it is
common practice that people use the internet to interact, collaborate and share
things with each other. Users publish their content on blogs and wikis, discuss
with each other and form online communities. According to Michael Koch and
Alexander Richter in [
Ideator - a collaborative idea management tool based
on the Semantic Wiki KiWi
The Ideator is a web based idea management tool that combines the web2.0
philosophy with semantic web technology. The Ideator has its name from idea
and motor and allows an innovative way of exploring and navigating within
content and an e ective ltering, search and visualization of ideas. We decided
to use the semantic wiki KiWi as a framework for our tool. The KiWi system
o ers a exible extension mechanism that allows the creation of semantic social
software applications based on the KiWi core system. The important point is
that most of the required functionalities of semantic social software applications
are provided by KiWi and can be easily adopted for speci c applications in
di erent domains [
The KiWi core system o ers ... several functionalities to support communities and which are typical for semantic social software applications, e.g. dashboard, social networking functionalities, collaborative tagging, ... ... a wiki based way to create, edit and link content ... forms which allow a structured acquisition of data and the possibility to transform unstructured wiki based data into structured form based data 1 http://www.facebook.com 2 www. ickr.com 3 www.wikipedia.com 4 http://www.bluekiwi-software.com/ 5 http://www.brainr.de/ 6 http://www.ideascale.com/ ... several ways to classify and navigate within content based on semantic web technologies ... an easy way to add domain speci c functionalities ... relevant features for enterprise applications like permission management, web services, versioning
We consider these points as key success factors for an idea management tool. The following section will describe functionalities of the Ideator in more detail. In addition, there will be a description of the needed modi cations of the KiWi system. 3.1
For the creation of a new idea the Ideator o ers alternatively a wiki or a form based approach. This will be described in the next section in more detail. An idea manager has an overview over all ideas and has the possibility to search for ideas according to di erent criterions. Furthermore the idea manager has the possibility to sort out the relevant ideas from the irrelevant ones. Additionally he/she can redirect an idea for evaluation to a reviewer. Beside the o cial reviewing process the community has the possibility to vote for an idea, too. Figure 1 illustrates the di erent user roles and their relations within the Ideator.
The Ideator tool allows the easy creation of new ideas according to the wiki philosophy and enables its systematically enrichment afterwards. The revolutionary thing is that the Ideator focuses on the user and the ideas instead of the processes within a company: Everyone can use the Ideator to create ideas without the restrictions that appear in common idea management systems. Ideas can be acquired as unstructured textual data within the wiki and no forms and processes that limit the creativity are necessary. This is a very important aspect for motivating people to publish their ideas. Additionally the Ideator wiki supports versioning and the upload of di erent types of media content. The bene t of creating ideas the wiki style is that each idea can be linked to other ideas or related articles.
Furthermore the Ideator o ers... - a structured way to create new ideas - the transformation of unstructured wiki data into structured data
Creating content the wiki way does not guarantee that all necessary
information is given. It is uncertain whether the costs of the ideas realisation are
included in the wiki text and whether the idea is categorized. Only forms can
guarantee the entry of data according to a speci cation by telling the user what
he/she has to ll in. On the one hand this guarantees a complete acquisition of
data and on the other hand it is the reason why several enterprise applications
are exclusively based on forms. In contrast to traditional wikis, where no
structure of content exists, the Ideator is based on the semantic wiki KiWi and its
data appears in a semi-structured form [
The Ideator allows people to create ideas according to the wiki philosophy and o ers additionally a form-based approach to enrich systematically the information. A user can choose forms from a pool and use them to add additional information during the runtime of the application. Unstructured wiki text can be annotated using RDFa.
The RDFa primer describe RDFa in [
After login a user is redirected to the dashboard that allows a personalized view on the content and provides a quick overview of the activities in the community. That informs the user about -all new submitted ideas -the best rated ideas -the activities in the community based on the community equity mechanism described above -the history of a users visited wiki pages
The dashboard is used to manage a users personal pro le and friendlist, which is the primary way to use the social networking functionality of the Ideator. Furthermore the dashboard motivates a user by illustrating its activity in form of a palm. The more active the user submits, rates or comments ideas the bigger the palm is. The same visualisation technique is used to visualize the activity of each idea. Additional to the o cial reviewing work ow each user has the possibility to vote for an idea: The user can support an idea by clicking the like button, illustrated in gure 3 in form of a thumb. 3.5
An idea manager needs to have an overview over all ideas. For this purpose the Ideator o ers a facetted search combined with an attractive and informative result representation. Each idea is visualized according to three dimensions within the portfolio matrix: potential for the market, feasibility and costs. Ideas, which have a high feasibility and a high potential for the market, are in the upper right corner of the portfolio. Ideas with a low feasibility and a low potential for the market are in the lower left. The size of the bubble illustrates the costs of the idea, i.e. the bigger the bubble the higher the costs. Each bubble itself deals as a link to the corresponding idea. This visualisation helps an idea manager to sort out relevant ideas from irrelevant ones. All visualized ideas can be ltered according to di erent criterions by a facetted classi cation mechanism. The facets are illustrated on the right side of gure 4. The semantic wiki KiWi o ers the basis for the facetted search and allows an easy adoption of the visualisation for the search results. In this paper we introduce into idea management and demonstrate how KiWi can be used to build an enterprise2.0 application. For this purpose we present the idea management tool Ideator. Especially in the domain of innovation management a high user participation is very important. Only if employees, suppliers and customers participate actively in the idea management process, good and economic ideas can grow. The Ideator is a very user centered application which o ers several functionalities which are typically for semantic social software applications like the user pro le, the dashboard and the possibility for a community to vote for an idea. People can put ideas on a watchlist and get informed about changes on this idea. Additionally a very innovative reputation mechanism motivates users to participate in the idea management process. Finding the idea is the one thing, sorting out the relevant ideas from the irrelevant ones is the other. The real strengths of the Ideator are the several possibilities to create, structure, navigate and search for data, which are enabled through the semantic basis of the KiWi framework.