You can create a perfectly useful knowledge management system without necessarily using schemas. Often, organizing pages with categories and subpages helps you with building a knowledge base that makes all your information easy to store and find. Often, documents have their own context and don't need more complex structured data to identify or query them.
However, whenever you create an information management system that heavily relies on clear document lifecycle elements such document ownership, a chain of approval, expiration dates and other document properties, you will want to work with schemas to add structured data to a wiki page.
Do I need schemas?
Schemas define property names, types, and constraints. This allows you to apply a set of related properties to a page. Each such set based on a partiular Schema is called a Subject on the page.
Pages that share the same properties can then be found and displayed anywhere in the wiki — via a data report, for example. And since the subjects typed relationships to each other (for example: "this person works at this organization located in this city") , they start forming a knowledge graph. This knowledge graph in turn can be useful not only to create data reports, but also to supply reliable and structured content to an AI chatbot in your wiki, if that is your goal.
Using a built-in schema
A wiki page that has structured data includes a structured data box outside the page content. The information in this data box is called a Subject.
Your wiki already includes typical knowledge management subjects, such as:
- Meeting minutes
- Request for comments
- Document control
To see which schemas are already available in your wiki, you can go to the page Special:Pages (usually linked in your Main Navigation as Pages), and select the namespace Schema.
Example: Document control
If you want to collect information about document type, document owner and other document control properties, you can apply the Schema Document control.
To add the schema Document control to a page:
- Select the
+button in the info panel of a wiki page. - Select the schema Document control from the dropdown list.
- Select a document type from the dropdown list. Enter any other information you would like.
- Create the subject.
Now that you have a structured data subject on the page, you can create reports for pages that contain a Document control subject.
