The Knowledge Base is a wiki that contains guides to using applications within UVa, with particular attention to tools developed by SHANTI. The url is wiki.shanti.virginia.edu. Readers can edit and comment on the Knowledge Base, but team writers develop the initial content model and write a set of initial guides for each application.
The Knowledge Base is broken into a series of application guides. Each application guide begins with an application landing page, which outlines the guide’s content. Within the application page, there are at least three broad categories: the glossary, guide section, and tutorial section. There may be as many guide sections as necessary to organize the guide’s content.
Finally, each section contains a series of short pages. These pages are the smallest unit of the Knowledge Base. The type of page within the section depends on the section's purpose. The glossary contains glossary definitions, the tutorial section contains tutorials, and the guide sections include step-by-step guides and orientation guides. Pages can communicate across sections through links or imported content.
The diagram below illustrates this content model.
In this diagram, each shape represents a page in the Knowledge Base. Pages at the same level in the hierarchy share the same shape. Dotted arrows represent communication between pages that aren’t hierarchy-based, either through links or imported pages.
Note that certain pages on the diagram are surrounded by a dotted box. These are branch pages — pages that don’t actually contain any significant content, but that group pages lower in the hierarchy together with a table of contents. Branch pages are usually displayed directly on the landing page. Sometimes, however, step-by-step guides within a section will be grouped under one branch page. This should only happen if the guide section would otherwise become long and unwieldy.
What does this tree-like hierarchy actually look like in the Knowledge Base? Here is an example from the sidebar (note not all pages are expanded):
Mandala is a suite of tools developed at SHANTI. Mandala helps scholars organize and share their content. Tools include text applications, media applications, visualization applications, and others. Since the broader Mandala framework supports many applications, the larger Mandala application landing page contains many smaller application landing pages, with their own guides, glossaries, and tutorials.