The Tearline Wiki is a cross-boundary wiki system based on the popular MediaWiki software which powers Wikipedia and Intellipedia. The Tearline Wiki can be used to collaborate across information boundaries, including those spanning multiple clearance levels. Separate knowledge repositories do not contain redundant or divergent information–data stays at its level of origin, but more privileged users can get a combined view of all of the data. The Tearline Wiki can also be used for aggregating multiple wikis. The Tearline Wiki is itself a single level component, designed for integration with a cross-domain component such as the Trusted Services Engine.
User Experience
The Tearline Wiki software is based on MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia and Intellipedia, and will be a familiar interface to most users. The Tearline Wiki provides different views to users who have access to different wikis, either because of their security level or their interest in the content of the wiki. The different sensitivity levels are separated by colored regions which give users a clear indication of the sensitivity of each level.
Knowledge Management that Crosses Security Boundaries
The Tearline Wiki facilitates collaboration between users on different sides of a security barrier. For instance, a user on an Intranet can view his/her corporate wiki alongside the wiki of a partner organization operating outside of the Intranet. To the user, the wikis appear as a seamlessly integrated knowledge repository:
- For topics that exist only on the Intranet, the user sees those pages normally.
- For topics that are on both the Intranet and the external wiki, the user sees the “Tearline View.”
- For topics that are only on the external wiki, the user sees those pages normally.
The following diagram depicts how the Intranet user sees a merged knowledge repository, but an external user will only see his/her wiki as normally.
