=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=Ideator - a collaborative enterprise idea management tool powered by KiWi
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-632/paper17.pdf
|volume=Vol-632
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/semwiki/SintMSK10
}}
==Ideator - a collaborative enterprise idea management tool powered by KiWi ==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-632/paper17.pdf
Ideator - a collaborative enterprise idea
management tool powered by KiWi?
Rolf Sint, Mark Markus, Sebastian Schaffert, Thomas Kurz
{firstname.surname}@salzburgresearch.at
Salzburg Research
Jakob Haringer Str. 5/3
5020 Salzburg
Austria
Abstract. ”The most difficult thing with ideas is not to have them. It’s
to find 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 cur-
rently under development and which offers innovative and flexible so-
lutions to idea management in company environments. It is based on
the semantic wiki KiWi that is a framework for semantic social soft-
ware applications. We present several functionalities of the Ideator and
show which modifications and extensions of KiWi are necessary for their
realisation.
1 Idea management
Idea management as a part of innovation management is an important factor
to increase the productivity of companies. It makes the development of new
products more efficient and helps to structure the ideation process within the
company. This saves costs and keeps a company competitive. Different stake-
holders, like employees, customers, suppliers or business partners may create new
ideas that appear in different forms. Some are small optimizations of processes
within a company and others are hot topics like ideas for innovative products.
Companies that support the idea management benefit from the accumulated
knowledge of its people [2]. In big companies, which support idea management
like Deutsche Post, hundreds of ideas are collected every day. The managements
challenge is the identification of the relevant ones from the whole amount of
ideas. For this purpose all submitted ideas have to be evaluated according to
different criterias, e.g. costs, benefits, innovativeness or the strategic relevance
for the company.
?
The research leading to these results is part of the project “KiWi - Knowledge in a
Wiki” and has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework
Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement No. 211932.
2
2 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 [3] more than 750 million users worldwide spend a high
amount of their free time on social networking sites. The effects of the growth
and the high acceptance of social software are relevant for companies, too. The
term enterprise2.0 describes the use of social software in the environment of a
company. They benefit from the high acceptance of these sorts of applications.
Michael Platt describes in [4] that Web2.0 applications ”...represent a significant
opportunity for organizations to build new social and web-based collaboration,
productivity, and business systems, and to improve cost and revenue returns.”
Currently some web2.0 based idea management tools exist on the market. Rep-
resentatives are BlueKiWi4 , BrainR5 and Ideascale6 . They have in common the
easy creation of ideas and offer special support for communities.
3 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 effective filtering, search and visualization of ideas. We decided
to use the semantic wiki KiWi as a framework for our tool. The KiWi system
offers a flexible 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 specific applications in
different domains [5].
The KiWi core system offers
... several functionalities to support communities and which are typical for se-
mantic social software applications, e.g. dashboard, social networking func-
tionalities, 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.flickr.com
3
www.wikipedia.com
4
http://www.bluekiwi-software.com/
5
http://www.brainr.de/
6
http://www.ideascale.com/
3
... several ways to classify and navigate within content based on semantic web
technologies
... an easy way to add domain specific 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 modifications of the KiWi
system.
3.1 Ideator workflow and user roles
For the creation of a new idea the Ideator offers 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 different 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 official re-
viewing process the community has the possibility to vote for an idea, too. Figure
1 illustrates the different user roles and their relations within the Ideator.
Fig. 1: user roles
3.2 Creating ideas the semantic wiki way ...
The Ideator tool allows the easy creation of new ideas according to the wiki phi-
losophy and enables its systematically enrichment afterwards. The revolutionary
4
thing is that the Ideator focuses on the user and the ideas instead of the pro-
cesses 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 pro-
cesses 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 different types of media content. The benefit of
creating ideas the wiki style is that each idea can be linked to other ideas or
related articles.
Furthermore the Ideator offers...
- 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 infor-
mation 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 specification by telling the user what
he/she has to fill 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 struc-
ture of content exists, the Ideator is based on the semantic wiki KiWi and its
data appears in a semi-structured form [6].
The Ideator allows people to create ideas according to the wiki philosophy and
offers additionally a form-based approach to enrich systematically the informa-
tion. 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 [7] as a ”...set of XHTML attributes to aug-
ment visual data with machine-readable hints.” It allows the annotation of free
text according to concepts in an ontology. Some paragraphs or entities in the
wiki article can be annotated with RDFa tags and as a consequence their values
appear in the form. The Ideator supports the user in entering RDFa tags with
a simple user interface that allows the selection of all possible RDFa properties.
Additionally several entities are automatically detected by the system based on
information extraction. Figure 2 illustrates the transformation of unstructured
wiki text to structured and form based information.
5
Fig. 2: unstructured wiki text combined with forms
3.3 Extended Community support
Like several other social networking websites the Ideator allows the user to ad-
minister the personal profile and to add other users as friends. In this way a user
will be notified about all submitted ideas of friends. Each idea can be assigned
to a user and it is possible to comment and rate ideas of others. Furthermore
an idea can be put on a personal watchlist and the user will be informed about
all activities of the containing ideas, e.g. changes of the content, new comments,
new ratings, tagging, viewing, etc. A special functionality of the Ideator is the
possibility to analyse and increase the activity of the community. This is pro-
vided by the integrated reputation mechanism Community Equity7 . By using
this model each activity on an existing idea increases its activity value and as a
consequence the reputation of a user gets higher, too. The Community Equity
mechanism is an integral part of the KiWi core system and a detailed description
about the algorithm can be found in [8]. In this way the most relevant ideas and
the most active users are identified.
7
http://kenai.com/projects/community-equity
6
3.4 Dashboard
Fig. 3: The ideator dashbaord
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 com-
munity. 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 profile 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 official reviewing workflow each user has the
possibility to vote for an idea: The user can support an idea by clicking the like
button, illustrated in figure 3 in form of a thumb.
7
3.5 Navigation of content / Exploring new ideas
Fig. 4: Idea Portfolio
An idea manager needs to have an overview over all ideas. For this purpose
the Ideator offers a facetted search combined with an attractive and informa-
tive 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 filtered ac-
cording to different criterions by a facetted classification mechanism. The facets
are illustrated on the right side of figure 4. The semantic wiki KiWi offers the
basis for the facetted search and allows an easy adoption of the visualisation for
the search results.
8
3.6 Conclusion
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 man-
agement 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
offers several functionalities which are typically for semantic social software ap-
plications like the user profile, 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 mo-
tivates 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.
References
1. Howland, C.: Zitat von Chris Howland. (www.zitate-online.de/autor/
howland-chris (9.03.2010))
2. Eggert, J.: What Is Idea Management? (http://www.idealeadership.com/About_
IL.htm (9.03.2010))
3. Koch, M., Richter, A.: Enterprise2.0. Ouldenburg, Germany (2007)
4. Platt, M.: The architecture journal. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/
library/bb735306.aspx (9.03.2010))
5. Schaffert, S., Eder, J., Sint, R., Grünwald, S., Stroka, S., Kurz, T., Radulescu, M.:
KiWi - A Platform for Semantic Social Software, Fourth Workshop on Semantic
Wikis, ESWC2009 (2008)
6. Sint, R., Schaffert, S., Stroka, S., Ferstl, R.: Combining Unstructured, Fully Struc-
tured and Semi-Structured Information in Semantic Wikis, Fourth Workshop on
Semantic Wikis, ESWC2009 (2009)
7. Adida, B., Birbeck, M.: RDFa Primer. http://www.w3.org/TR/
xhtml-rdfa-primer/ (9.03.2010) (2007)
8. Schaffert, S., Siorpaes, K., Reiser, P., Radulescu, M., Riachtchentsev, D.: Commu-
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(to appear)