ENWIC: Visualizing Wiki Semantics as Topic Maps - An Automated Topic Discovery and Visualization Tool

In this paper, we present ENWiC (EduNuggets Wiki Crawler), a framework for intelligent visualization of Wikis. In recent years, e-learning has emerged as an appealing alternative to traditional teaching. The effectiveness of e-Learning is depended upon the sharing of information on the web, which makes the web a vast library of information that students and instructors can utilize for educational purposes. Wiki’s collaborative authoring nature makes it a very attractive tool to use for e-Learning purposes; however, its text-based navigational structure becomes insufficient as the Wiki grows in size, and this backlash can hinder students from taking full advantage of the information available. ENWiC’s goal is to provide student with an intelligent interface for navigating Wikis and other similar large-scale websites. ENWiC make use of graphic organizers to visualize the relationships between content pages so that students can gain a cognitional understanding of the content as they navigating through the Wiki pages. We describe ENWiC’s automated visualization process, and its user interfaces for students to view and navigate the Wiki in a meaningful manner, and for instructors to further enhance the visualization. We also discuss our usability study for evaluating ENWiC’s effectiveness as a Wiki Interface.