Ask Slashdot: Documenting Scattered Sites and Systems?

Posted by timothy on Sunday January 8, 2012 @05:34AM from the you'll-need-a-lot-of-gasoline-but-only-1-match dept.

First time accepted submitter capriguy84 writes "Six months ago I joined a small firm(~30) where I am pretty much the IT systems guy. I was immediately asked to work on couple of projects without much going through the documentation on what currently exists. So I created new wiki topics everywhere and whenever needed. I am now in a situation where information is scattered across multiple pages and there is lot of overlapping. So I have decided to start a project of re-organizing the wiki so that it makes sense to me and easily accessible for others. I am dealing with 2 disjoint sites, 4 data centers, managing all flavors of Unix, windows, networking, storage, VMware etc. Along with that I have HOWTO guides, cheatsheets, contracts, licensing, projects, proposals and other things that typically exist in a enterprise. Any tips with how to approach? Dos & Don'ts? Recommended reading?"

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Semantic Wiki by sperxios10 · 2012-01-08 06:10 · Score: 5, Interesting

Last year i used MediaWiki's SemanticWiki to describe the systems, projects, human-resources, external-urls and their dependencies of a telecom.
Besides trivial parent-child relations among developers/employees, departments, etc,
i described system dependencies as semantic-relationsships with names like this: part of, invokes, build by, implements, deployed on, etc.
I described developer responsibilities with names like this: maintained by, coded by, external contact, etc.
Finally, the documentation pages and the refs to external-URLs of projects were reorganized by semantic-relations, like this: javadoc, docUrl, webApp, section of, help page, etc.