Structure of the wiki
Units
The wiki describes several distinct units in the organization of standards in The Netherlands. Namely,
- Standards
- Application profiles
- Working groups
- Decisions
The standards are usually international agreements. The pages concerning the standards provide a short description of the standard and a URL to the standards own page. These pages will also provide a link to the application profile describing the standard's use.
The core unit of the wiki are the application profiles, which describe how a standard is used in The Netherlands within the appropiate context. Each application profile describes a solution to a specific problem. When looking up such an application profile, two levels of detail are present; Overview, which describes what the problem is and how this is solved, basically to give an idea of the application profile, and Expert, which gives technical details about the application profile and how it works. In each an abstract is present that describes in short what the application profile is about. In essence, the Expert detail level is the official application profile, Overview is a description of this. The wiki pages of the application profile all have the status Draft. For the official agreed upon version, see the PDF file.
The pages concerning the working groups describe the working groups that are responsible for maintaining the application profiles. In these pages a description is given of what problem the specific working group tries to solve and what their scope and role is. With these pages, one can also find out who works on specific application profiles and how to contact them.
The last unit are the decisions, which describe the decisions made by working groups and the WISH in the last years concerning the use of standards.
Structure
The application profiles are structured in several ways. First, an alphabetical list of all the application profiles is present on [Application profiles]. On the [Categories] page, all the application profiles are categorized according to their topic.
On the SURFfields page, the application profiles are ordered with their relevance to the distinct fields SURF is active in and in which these application profiles are used.
How to use the wiki
Besides reading the wiki and learning about the topics one is interested in, the main advantage a wiki has is the functionality of collaboration. The collaboration this wiki provides is described in three actions:
- Commenting
- Editing
- Exporting to PDF
Commenting
Each page features the possibility to post comments. Especially in the case of the application profiles it might be of interest to ask questions or propose changes to the application profile. Everyone is allowed to post comments, these comments may then be replied to be the moderator assigned to the specific application profile.
Editing
The application profiles may need changes, the moderator can make changes to the page. There are two stages of changing a profile: when editing a profile, one should annotate these changes to identify their proper status. When a change of an application profile is proposed by a moderator, this moderator should add the {proposal} tags around this change. When this proposal is agreed upon by the relevant working group, the status should be updated to advice and the tags should be {advice}. This results in the following identifications of status:
{proposal}
Insert proposed change here
{proposal}
{advice}
Insert adviced change here
{advice}
Only the moderator is allowed to make these changes.
Exporting to PDF
The advice from a working group is then discussed in the WISH, which decides whether the change should be made officially part of the application profile. When this is the case the annotations may be removed and an export is made of the wikipage to PDF. The PDF file is then uploaded and becomes the latest official agreed upon version. The changes are described in the Document history on the wikipage.
Workflow
The above results in the following workflow: 