Semantic Wikis

OntoWiki - support for agile, distributed knowledge engineering scenarios

Dr. Cornelia-Flavia VEJA

About us

www.iris-semdata.comLia.Veja@iris-semdata.com

CONTENT

1. Introduction2. Semantic Wikis3. OntoWiki4. Semantic MediaWiki5. Wiki Applications6. Conclusions

Introduction

• Social networks emerge around ‘object centered sociality’ .(Karin Knorr Cetina, Jyri Engeström)

• participants consuming information and provide content and metadata

• Ward Cunningham in 1994,“The simplest online database that could possibly work” – easy to edit, interlink and share

• A wiki system is a form of Social Software web based platform which allows collaboratively digital content creating, maintaining and retrieving.

• A wiki, as Social Software instance, is a collection of collaborative created articles having structured, formatted text and untyped hyperlinks to other related articles within the wiki and serving a community.

Key Technology: Wikis

Wiki popularity is based on several features

Collaboration aspect:

information became

immediately available

Simplicity of document

creation and information interlinking

Openness for reading, editing

and experiments (modification

histories)

Fine granularity of information

Refactoring: simplicity in document

creation and versioning encourage

refactoring of the information

Why Wikis ?

wikis are a state of the art content collaborative tool

users are quite familiar with wikis

it provides a uniform tool for the (informal)

specification of the different components of an enterprise model

Template namespaceHelp namespace

Main namespace

Wiki Structure

Category:Documentation

Help: Add_new

Help: How_toMain:Soft_Tools

Main:Main_PageFile:Text.pdf

Main:New_Event

File:Logo.jpg

Template:Docu

Template:Events

Category: Events

Wiki Interlinked Content

Help: Add_new

Help: How_to

Main:Soft_Tools

Main:Main_Page

File:Text.pdf

Main:New_Event

File:Logo.jpg

Template:Docu

Template:Events

Wikis common problems

• Unstructured information => problems for knowledge management and productivity– Quality control during data entry is less strong in wikis.

• Solutions:1. the information to be entered into structured forms - templates2. using Semantic MediaWiki extension

Semantic Social Approach

• Social Software deals with social connections and human readable content

• Semantic Web deals with formal connections and formal content.

• Semantic Social Software as a tool that simplifies and improves the creation of structured content on the Semantic Web.

Semantic Social Approach

TaxonomyWiki

categoryObject of interest

descriptionVocabularies

OntologySMW Properties,Templates

Taxonomy

Open Knowledge

Base

SMW enhanced wiki pages

Ontology

Semantic Wikis

User perspective

Kno

wle

dge

expr

essi

vity

OntoWiki

• Form-based semantic wiki application. • OntoWiki is more of a collaborative ontology editor rather

than a Semantic wiki. • It does not have the familiar wiki interface of entering

natural language text informally to represent a concept • supports several collaborative features and allows the

installation of plug-ins. • The OntoWiki implementation conceptualizes each page

as a resource, storing triple statements in an RDF store. • The basis of the implementation is the Powl framework

and Erfurt API.http://powl.sourceforge.net/overview.php

OntoWiki

• collaborative knowledge engineering toolkit• assist you managing your knowledge• rich user interface to organize and manage resources,

relations between resources, classes• It is a Linked Data server for your data as well as a 

Linked Data client to fetch additional data from the web• It is a Semantic Pingback Client in order to receive and

send back-linking request as known from the blogosphere• OntoWiki is backend independent

– MySQL database – Virtuoso Triple Store

OntoWiki-CMS

• Human access interfaces (full-text search, faceted-browsing, query builder, HTML/RDFa, forms)

• machine access (RDFa, Linked Data, SPARQL)• directly based on the RDF data model• Enable the classic separation between frontend and

backend usually in web CMSs.• declarative, pattern-based manner for continuous

evolution and refinement of knowledge bases• Use of Semantically Interlinked Online Communities

(SIOC) for news and SKOS taxonomy for navigation

OntoWiki-CMSarchitecture

• Human access interfaces (faceted-browsing, query builder, HTML/RDFa, forms)

• machine access (RDFa, Linked Data, SPARQL)• directly based on the RDF data model• Enable the classic separation between frontend and

backend usually found in web CMSs.

OntoWiki Extensions

• Wikipedia like Wiki's: create wiki pages using Markdown and have to possibility to attach wiki pages to existing resources

• PubSubHubbub to spread local knowledge changes over the web and be synced with foreign sources

• Extension named CubeViz for visualization of statistical data which are organized in the DataCube format.

• Integration of maps• Syndication via:

– RSS news feeds from weblogs and Twitter,– Slideshare presentations,– Scientific publication data from BibSonomy, and– information about LOD2 protagonists from their FOAF/WebID

resources.

Semantic MediaWiki Content

Help: Add_newMain:New_Events

Main:Conf_ICCP[[hasLogo::File.jpg]]

The [[Name::ICCP2010]]could be held in

[[Place::Cluj-Napoca]]from [[Date_start::28.08.2010]]

to [[Date_end::28.08.2010]].Please contact the chair of the

[[Event::Conference]], [[Chair::Letea Alfred]],

and fill the following form:{{Events| First= | Last=…}}

File:Logo_ICCP

Template:Events{{

| First=[[First::{{{First}}}]]| Last=[[Last::{{{Last}}}]]

| Affiliation=[[Aff::{{{Afi}}}]]…………

}}

Category: Events

Wiki Applications

• Scientific projects employ wikis as encyclopedia, handbook or publishing platforms

• Research platforms need data gathered from libraries and references

• Projects need bibliographic references and tools for the analysis of newly created knowledge

• Projects need external metadata import and resource interlinking

• There is extremely motivated community of non-technical people

• OntoWiki + CubeViz are already in use for the Open Data portal of the European Union.(http://lod2.eu/Welcome.html)

Wiki ApplicationsContributions

• User-centred and collaborative approach for metadata repository management

• Enhance the knowledge of biodiversity• improving the availability of digital resources• digital tools for the identification of living organisms

• New automatic method for metadata repository management• web-based MediaWiki system• low-tech interoperability and repository layer

• Collaborative Digital Repository Management (CDRM) Model

• VREs need automatic metadata initial import, automatic reference integration and user-friendly tools for Analysis

CONCLUSIONS

• usage of the same collaborative and familiar web space • builds upon existing structures, following the “natural” real-

world’s relationships reflected in connections.• supports the collaboration of people with different

backgrounds and expertise, allowing a layered knowledge model, complementing each other expertise.

• provides instant gratification: every part of formal knowledge contributed by a user is immediately usable.

• collaborative authoring tool of semantically enriched Web content

Questions?

Thank you!