Replacing Survey Articles with Wikis?
Earlier this year, together with Ahmed Elmagarmid and Vassilios Verykios, we published a survey article at IEEE TKDE on duplicate record detection (also known as record linkage, deduplication, and with many other names).
Although I see this paper as a good effort in organizing the literature in the field, I will be the first to recognize that the paper is incomplete. We tried our best to include every research effort that we identified, and the reviewers helped a lot in this respect. However, I am confident that there are still many nice papers that we missed.
Furthermore, since the time the paper has been accepted for publication, many more papers have been published and many more will be published in the future. So, this means that the useful half-life of (any?) such survey is necessarily short.
How can we make such papers more relevant and more resistant to deprecation? One solution that I am experimenting with is to make the survey article a wiki, and then post it to Wikipedia, allowing other researchers to add their own papers in the survey.
I am not sure if Wikipedia is the best option, due to licensing issues, though. A personal wiki may be a better option, but I do not have a good grasp of the pros and cons of each approach. One of the benefits of Wikipedia is the existence of nice templates for handling citations. One of the disadvantages is the copyright license of Wikipedia, which may discourage (or prevent) people from posting material there.
Furthermore, it is not clear that a wikified document is the best way to organize a survey. A few days back, I got a (forwarded) email from Foster Provost, who was seeking my opinion for the best way to organize an annotated bibliography. (Dragomir Radev had a similar question.) Is a wiki the best option? Or is it by construction too flat? Should we use some other type of software that allows people to generate explicit, annotated connections between the different papers? (Any public tool?)
Any ideas?
5 comments:
Hi, Panos. I'm the person whose message Foster forwarded. My criteria are a little bit different from Dragos'. It sounds like he's looking for a paper/bibliography management tool, whereas I'm interested in a method that can allow someone to see an entire subfield and the interconnections between work. Ideally they would allow collaboration too.
Wikis are not a bad idea (apart from copyright issues) but they tend to be too flat and linear. I'd like something that can depict interrelationships among pieces of work, using relations like:
- has-subproblem
- improvement-upon
- overcomes-limitation-of
- alternative-approach
etc. Wikis can't easily show this. There is a family of tools called concept mapping that I've been looking into, the most promising of which looks like CMapTools (http://cmap.ihmc.us/). It's open source and allows collaboration with privileges. My only doubt about CMapTools is that I'm not sure their concept maps are powerful enough to incorporate elaborate annotations.
A few more miscellaneous notes:
- Wikis are not hard to set up, if that's the way you want to go. They're very easy.
- I don't think Wikipedia is the way to go, for several reasons. Apart from copyright issues, survey papers don't really fit the mold of encyclopedia entries. Also, ideally you'd like these field descriptions to be more dynamic, such that new researchers can come in and add their work along with comments. I don't think Wikipedia entries are meant to be such evolving entities.
- Fixed documents (published papers) aren't the best either. The main attraction of a survey paper is that it can be cited. Most fields are moving and growing and survey articles are necessarily only a snapshot. Also, it's a lot of work to write a survey paper, and most journals are reluctant to publish them. This argues for them not to be published (in the traditional sense) and to be developed by a community rather than a single person or group of people.
I think that all questions (mine, Drago's, and yours) are revolving around the issue of organizing the literature in one field.
I would have liked to see a bibliography management tool with the graph capabilities that CMaps seems to have. Perhaps it is easy to code such a tool, once the requirement are in place. A request at rentacoder.com may suffice :-)
Unfortunately, I cannot even install CMaps on my computer to see its real capabilities; during installation, I get a message that says that CMaps cannot be installed using the current configuration (Vista with an ATI graphics card).
Here is an example of an annotated bibliography on the ACL Wiki:
http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Annotated_Bibliography_on_Statistical_Semantics
Here is the parent page:
http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Bibliographies
I was able to use refbase for most of my needs. You should check it out.
http://wiki.refbase.net/index.php/Documentation
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