Tomorrow afternoon I will be talking about Content Management and Social Media for the Insurance Industry. This talk is part of the Jumpstart series offered by Earley & Associates. I’ll talk about some of the current troubles of traditional content management solutions and offer up some ideas on how wikis in the enterprise can help. I also provide a brief introduction to Semantic MediaWiki (SMW). (For those of you who may have seen my other presentations on this topic, this will be a shortened version of the same material.)
Looking ahead I’ve been thinking about how to offer more services around Semantic Wikis and what potential customers might want when engaging a consultant in this area. It’s an area worth pondering because building applications with SWM changes the game of software development a bit. For one things it’s a lot faster to develop SMW applications and it’s a bit easier. However it still requires good old fashioned thinking. Also it requires combining skill sets from a variety of traditional areas in software development. In a phrase I could say “traditional software engineering skills still apply”.
What do I mean by this? Well here’s a quick list off the top of my head of the skills I’ve been using and sometimes redefining (or at least refining) as I build or help others build these semantic applications in a wiki environment.
- A good head for requirements analysis.
- Techniques for building semantic models to jump start the design.
- A standard approach to prototyping that establishes the basic framework of the application
- Inclusion of traditional web site design techniques to cover all the bases of building a usable application.
- And a complete development methodology that is agile and includes the customer on a regular basis.
Does this approach work? So far it seems to be. The only other thing I think I can add to this at the moment is that when developing Semantic MediaWiki applications there seems to be a recurring need for what I can only call “applied cleverness”. What do I mean by this? Well it’s hard to say without being specific, but lets just say that the rising tide of new web 2.0/3.0 tools and techniques that are available today are continually inspiring me to combine these tools in new ways that (I believe) have never been done before. There is a tremendous amount of “invention” going on today in this industry. And it’s a heck of a lot of fun to be a part of it. But now I’m wandering into a new topic so I’ll stop here and save this for another post yet to come.
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