I use TWiki as a notetaking, brainstorming platform for large-scale research projects in the humanites. A simple plugin supporting semantically rich links expressing quasi-logical relations would greatly help in this. I have in mind links that would express relations such as:

1. Topic A supports topic B

2. Topic A puts in question topic B

3. Topic A refutes topic B

4. Topic A provides the background for topic B

...

The idea is to have typed links. This would enable a little bit of automated processing. For example, a list of topics supporting or challenging the topic being rendered could be displayed in a sidebar.

I am not sure what types of links would be best, but this could be configured by the user. I am also not sure what syntax could be used. Perhaps an expression such as "Supports-WikiName" could be interpreted to mean that the topic in which it appears supports the topic WikiName.

It seems to me that this feature would not be too hard to implement. We are speaking of minor modifications to the parsing, rendering and persistence modules.

Obviously, the DialecticsPlugin would be most valuable for wiki that are meant to support discussions of all sorts. Hence the name. I have in mind more advanced features than the typed links, but this would be a very good start.

I'd appreciate any pointers to similar projects --after a few hours of research I did not find anything. If I don't find a wiki that supports this, I'm going to modify TWiki to do it.

-- DavidBourget - 16 Nov 2004

I've done a similar thign with a Business Policy framework. Policies realte to 'who it applies to', Standards, Guidelines, Procedures, , Regualtory Requirements etc. I adopted Lynwood's TopicClassificationAddOn. THIs may not seem intuitively obvious at first, and no,nit isn't "out of the box". I had to duplicate many of the EditTemplates and alster some of the templates that were included. Its still 'work in progress'. But it does give typed' links in that each Policy topic INLCUDEs the sarch for related Standards, Guidelines, etc.

The links are geenrated dynamically. I did have to extend the WebForm for my own purposes. There can, of course, be a M-to-N relationshop. You may only want a 1-to-1, but that's OK too.

I suggest you ask LynnwoodBrown about this, sicne its 'work in progress' for him as well. Ask to see what he's currently doing with it.

-- AntonAylward - 16 Nov 2004

Thanks Anton. I looked at the add on, and it is not exactly what I am looking for. Indeed, it enables some structuring. But in my case it is not topics that I want to classify, but links.

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After more research I found that PeriPeri (http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/DialecticsPlugin) comes with RDF metadata features that could be used to do what I want. The links would be entered as metadata instead of normal links. I find that the engine itself is too primitive in other respects, however, so I am still thinking of creating a DialecticsPlugin for TWiki.

Several threads of discussion of existing and dreamed of WikiEngines with features similar to that of DialecticsPlugin can be found at: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?DebateTool.

-- DavidBourget - 6 Dec 2004

I just posted EmbedTopicPlugin. This is very handy for notetaking as well.

-- DavidBourget - 24 Dec 2004