Her-IT-age.net knowledge bank has been designed, assembled and started under the EPOCH project, and is targeted towards all Cultural Heritage professionals that are interested in the correct and efficient use of ICT.
Her-IT-age.net is the Network of Expertise that will support professionals in Cultural Heritage (CH) both on a regional level through local expertise centers and on an international level through her-IT-age.net itself. This knowledge bank is organised as a standard wiki to allow all professionals to contribute to this expertise, and more specifically to give a platform for the expertise centres to find and provide expertise in the CH+ICT domain.
Software Platform:
The MediaWiki (www.mediawiki.org) wiki software has been identified as a suitable platform to power the EPOCH wiki. It has been installed on the Interactive Institute’s web server and is written in PHP with a MySQL backend.
The platform houses a rich set of feature of which the following are most relevant to this project:
- Wiki — collaborative document system with versioning
- User package — Manages user accounts and permissions
- Calendar – Calendar extension to keep track of conferences, workshops and other current events
- Categories (also Tags) — Classification of content
- Search function
- GUI editor — Editing of content will require minimal if no knowledge of wiki markup
- Attachments — Editors can attach files to wiki pages
- An extension, Semantic Mediawiki, was installed and configured on top of wikimedia — the wiki platform used for EPOCH Wiki. Allows the tagging of semantic information to wiki content. Will improve search and navigation capabilities with little additional wiki markup
- Semantic Forms, again an extension, provides functionality to easily create forms which users can use when adding content with minimal knowledge of semantic wiki markup
- The structure of content has been defined and embedded into the site in the form of page categories, templates and semantic properties
- Four page creation forms (General, Person, Event, Organisation) have been created and will allow users to fill out page templates quickly and with minimal knowledge of wiki markup
- Page templates have been enriched with decorative layout tables that will improve page layouts without emcumbering users with any additional work
- The main page and sidebar have been fleshed out with entry points to the site’s content
- Some of the initial content has been added to the site, primarily to test site functionality
- Partners:
EPOCH, EU