Open Spaces

2 projects, 20 flights and 4 cities later here I am back at the keyboard. Work has been a little crazy over the last couple months. This doesn’t mean, that I haven’t been working on cool stuff for MIKE2.0 with MediaWiki. It’s just that I haven’t had any time yet to tell you guys about it! Over the next couple of weeks I will make time to release some of my work to the open source community again.

One vision with building a standard around MIKE2.0, the open source Information Management standard, is to enable us (BearingPoint) but also the community to hook into the open source standard. Nowadays you would probably call this a “standard mashup”. For MIKE2.0 we termed it “Integrated Content Repository“. Last year, we did about 1,600 projects in Information Management and we are trying hard, to link all of our assets (templates, tools, standards etc.) into the MIKE2.0 standard to prove to ourselves and also to our customers that we can deliver complex IM projects, across many topical areas under one common standard. And that common standard shall be maintained and extended by on open source community. In order for that community to benefit from the standard the same way we do, we need to provide a framework and the tools to link their internal and private efforts into the open standard.

The API Query Extension allows users to query the API of another Mediawiki. In version 1, we focus on retrieving all articles that are part of a certain category and displaying this list within another wiki page. The below screenshot shows how we can include a simple box with a blogroll view of articles within a wiki page. This allows us publish and edit internal, private content on our internal wiki, but at the same time make the user aware that there is open source content (solutions, standards, best practices etc.) available as well.

The parameters of the extension allow you to specify the type of query and to restrict the query with search terms. The Mediawiki API is still in its infancy, but already provides some great opportunities for integrating multiple wikis based on loose coupling (web services or http queries). As the Mediawiki API will grow in functionality, so I hope that the community will help to build out the API Query Extension to provide better and greater results.

The new API Query Extension is the first mosaic stone in the set of tools we need to make this integrated content repository work. More will follow in the near future…hold tight!