Jipdigao

This is the user page of Oscar Díaz. Oscar Díaz works as a Full Professor at the University of the Basque Country. His research interests are in Model-Driven Engineering, End-User Development, Collaborative Software Development and Augmented Browsing. Díaz got his BSc. degree from the the University of the Basque Country. He has a PhD in computer science from the University of Aberdeen. Oscar Diaz leads the ONEKIN research group.

Projects related with wikis

• WikiLayer. Reading Wikipedia is the entry to more involved activities such as editing. However, the jump from reading to editing could be too big for some wikipedians who can be intimidated by exposing their content to public scrutiny. Annotating might foster not only reading but also be the prelude to editing. Different annotation tools exist for the Web (e.g., Diigo, A.nnotate). Being a Web application, Wikipedia can benefit from these tools. However, general-purpose annotation tools do not make annotation a natural gesture within Wikipedia. That is, annotation editing, rendering or retrieval in e.g. Diigo is dissociated from the edition, rendering or location of articles in Wikipedia, hindering the role of annotation as the prelude to article edition. WikiLayer is a Wikipedia-specific annotation tool.

• Wiki Refactoring. The organisation of corporate wikis tends to deteriorate as time goes by. Rearranging categories, structuring articles and even moving sections among articles are cumbersome tasks in current wiki engines. This discourages the layman. But, it is the layman who writes the articles, knows the wiki content and detects refactoring opportunities. Our goal is to improve the refactoring affordances of current wiki engines by providing an alternative front-end tuned to refactoring. This is achieved by (1) surfacing the structure of the wiki corpus as a mind map, and (2) conducting refactoring as mind map reshaping. To this end, we introduce WikiWhirl, a domain-specific language for wiki refactoring. WikiWhirl is supported as an extension of FreeMind, a popular mind mapping tool. In this way, refactoring operations are intuitively conducted as actions upon mind map nodes.

• Generating wiki structures from mind maps. As any other Information System resource, wiki success highly depends on the interplay of technology, work practice and the organization. Thus, wiki contributions should be framed along the concerns already in use in the hosting organization in terms of glossaries, schedules, policies, organigrams and the like. The question is then, how can corporate strategies permeate wiki construction while preserving wiki openness and accessibility? We advocate for the use of “Wiki Scaffoldings”, i.e., a wiki installation that is provided at the onset to mimic these corporate concerns: categories, users, templates, articles initialized with boilerplate text, are all introduced in the wiki before any contribution is made. To retain wikis' friendliness and engage layman participation, we propose scaffoldings to be described as mind maps. Mind maps are next “exported” as wiki installations. We show the feasibility of the approach introducing a Wiki Scaffolding Language (WSL). WSL is realized as a plugin for FreeMind, a popular tool for mind mapping.

Other projects

• Sticklet. Web Augmentation is to the Web what augmented reality is to the physical world: layering relevant content/layout/navigation over the existing Web to customize the user experience. However, Web Augmentation is hindered by being programming intensive and prone to malware. This prevents end-users from participating as both producers and consumers of scripts: producers need to know JS, consumers need to trust JS. This work aims at promoting end-user participation in both roles. The vision is for end-users to prosume (the act of simultaneously caring for producing and consuming) scripts as easily as they currently prosume their pictures or videos.
• Lightweight End-User Software Sharing. This work looks into the sharing of end-user software (referred to as “script”). Based on this study four implications are drawn: reduce the effort to make scripts shareable, minimize deployment burdens, less stringent protection mechanisms, and tap into communities of practice as for sharing.
• Open personalization. Open innovation and collaborative development are attracting considerable attention as new software construction models. Traditionally, website code is a “wall garden” hidden from partners. In the other extreme, you can move to open source where the entirety of the code is disclosed. A middle way is to expose just those parts where collaboration might report the highest benefits. Personalization can be one of those parts. Partners might be better positioned to foresee new ways to adapt/extend your website based on their own resources and knowledge of their customer base. We coin the term “Open Personalization” to refer to those practises and architectures that permit partners to inject their own personalization rules.