How to Add Labels at Sentence Level (not just the page level)

[Jonathan Boarman]

We are trying to convert a mountain of policy documents into a Confluence wiki. However, there's a critical feature needed that is being used in these Word documents that needs to be replicated within Confluence. The needed feature is the ability to tag specific sentences within the document (not just at the page level).

Feature Description

In order to reproduce this functionality, we need to find a way to provide the following behaviours:

1. Ability to select and wrap key sentences. (mentally, I'm thinking a concept like an HTML span tag)
2. Ability to set a label to the selected sentence. (e.g., label might be "role:network-administrator")
3. Ability to extract a list of sentences from the entire wiki that contain a particular tag label. This is more complicated than simply listing pages that contain the tag since, for example, we need to be able to extract and print out the responsibilities for a given role.

Question

How would you tackle particular aspects of the desired functionality? Even if it's not appararent how to solve all the issues, what approaches, types of plugins or general concepts would need to be considerd to reproduce this behaviour using Confluence?

Background Use Case

The use case for this is that they are able to identify all the places in a document where a responsibility was defined and to whom it was assigned. The end result iss that they can extract a list of responsibilities for each role within a single, centralized document. This eliminated redundancies and ensured the responsibilities matrix was always up-to-date.

OK, so that's using MS Word and a user-defined macro. But, this is Confluence. What do you suggest?

[David at David Simpson Apps]

You could achieve some of this now with this very unpleasant workaround:

1. Add each sentence as a child of the page where the full document is contained.
2. Label each one sentence page appropriately.
3. Include each one sentence page in the parent to produce the full document.

It would not be a nice editing experience though.

[Joerg Bencke]

Hi,

I am not a Confluence-Wizard, but I could think of two ways :

1) Expand the "excerpt" macro to become label-aware. So you could go to a source and mark a word, sentence, paragraph, section as {except : label=roledefintion}. Now you need to build your destination page to retrieve the excerpts by label.

2) Build a script to extract the word-sections and create wiki pages with title = "<Labelname> + LastHeadingOrOther" and tag it with <labelname>. in the word-original, you should replace the text with a link to the wikipage. THat might need some extending of the word-import-function as well, but might be worth it.

GOod luck, let us know what happened.

[Joerg Bencke]

Update after a quick check : See here http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Re-using+Content+in+Technical+Documentation#Re-usingContentinTechnicalDocumentation-UsingtheMultiExcerptPlugin , somebody else had a similar idea already.