Bringing the “Wiki-Way ” to the Semantic Web with

2006

The Wiki and the Semantic Web can be compared as two different approaches to capturing knowledge, where the former trades away precise, explicit, and internally consistent semantics for speed and simplicity. Any attempt to bridge these two approaches has to either somehow reconcile these trades-off or make compromises one way or the other. This paper describes how Rhizome, an open source application framework for developing "Semantic Wiki" applications, attempts to bridge these approaches. Rhizome includes a text formatting language called ZML whose syntax is similar to text formatting languages found in most Wikis but with enhancement to make it easy for users to express explicit and arbitrary semantics. Rhizome relies on "shredding", a flexible framework for specifying rules for characterizing semi-structured content with RDF and providing an ontology that can precisely describe the relationship between the source content and the resulting statements.

2006

Wikis are Web applications that blur the boundaries between readers and authors, allowing non-technical people to author hypertexts through a web interface. A Semantic Wiki is a Wiki that attempts the same thing with the Semantic Web, allowing non-technical users to create semantic resources and/or ontologies. In this paper we characterise the different ways in which a Wiki might support the Semantic Web and present Weerkat, a modular and extensible Wiki that has ontological hypertext support.

2006

Wikis are social web sites enabling a potentially large number of participants to modify any page or create a new page using their web browser. As they grow, wikis suffer from a number of problems (anarchical structure, large number of pages, aging navigation paths, etc.). We believe that semantic wikis can improve navigation and search. In SweetWiki we investigate the use of semantic web technologies to support and ease the lifecycle of the wiki. The very model of wikis was declaratively described: an OWL schema captures concepts such as WikiWord, wiki page, forward and backward link, author, etc. This ontology is then exploited by an embedded semantic search engine (Corese). In addition, SweetWiki integrates a standard WYSIWYG editor (Kupu) that we extended to support semantic annotation following the "social tagging" approach made popular by web sites such as flickr.com. When editing a page, the user can freely enter some keywords in an AJAX-powered textfield and an auto-completion mechanism proposes existing keywords by issuing SPARQL queries to identify existing concepts with compatible labels. Thus tagging is both easy (keyword-like) and motivating (real time display of the number of related pages) and concepts are collected as in folksonomies. To maintain and reengineer the folksonomy, we reused a web-based editor available in the underlying semantic web server to edit semantic web ontologies and annotations. Unlike in other wikis, pages are stored directly in XHTML ready to be served and semantic annotations are embedded in the pages themselves using RDF/A. If someone sends or copy a page, the annotations follow it, and if an application crawls the wiki site it can extract the metadata and reuse them.

Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 2008

Everyone agrees that user interactions and social networks are among the cornerstones of "Web 2.0". Web 2.0 applications generally run in a web browser, propose dynamic content with rich user interfaces, offer means to easily add or edit content of the web site they belong to and present social network aspects. Well-known applications that have helped spread Web 2.0 are blogs, wikis, and image/video sharing sites; they have dramatically increased sharing and participation among web users. It is possible to build knowledge using tools that can help analyze users' behavior behind the scenes: what they do, what they know, what they want. Tools that help share this knowledge across a network, and that can reason on that knowledge, will lead to users who can better use the knowledge available, i.e., to smarter users. Wikipedia, a wildly successful example of web technology, has helped knowledge-sharing between people by letting individuals freely create and modify its content. But Wikipedia is designed for people-today's software cannot understand and reason on Wikipedia's content. In parallel, the "semantic web", a set of technologies that help knowledge-sharing across the web between different applications, is starting to gain attraction. Researchers have only recently started working on the concept of a "semantic wiki", mixing the advantages of the wiki and the technologies of the semantic web. In this paper we will present a state-of-the-art of semantic wikis, and we will introduce SweetWiki, an example of an application reconciling two trends of the future web: a semantically augmented web and a web of social applications where every user is an active provider as well as a consumer of information. SweetWiki makes heavy use of semantic web concepts and languages, and demonstrates how the use of such paradigms can improve navigation, search, and usability.

2008

We present ODEWiki, a technology for the development of Semantic Wikis, which has a combined set of added-value features over other existing semantic wikis in the state of the art. Namely, ODEWiki interoperates with an existing semantic portal technology (ODESeW), it manages inconsistencies raised because of the distributed nature of knowledge base development and maintenance, it uses RDFa for the annotation of the resulting wiki pages, it follows a WYSIWYG approach, and it allows decoupling wiki pages and ontology instances, that is, a wiki page may contain one or several ontology instances. Although some of these features appear in some of the state-of-the-art semantic wikis, but they are not combined together in a single solution.