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Semantic Wikis: The Wiki Way to the Semantic Web?
Semantic Wiki Mini-Series
1st session:
A Survey of the Landscape and State-of-Art in
Semantic Wiki
Co-chairs:
Sebastian Schaffert (Salzburg Research, Austria),
Max Völkel (FZI Karlsruhe)
2008-10-23
1
Agenda
Introduction
History
State of the Art
Trends
2
Introduction
Introduction
3
Introduction
Introduction: Semantic Wikis
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wiki principles
metaweb
two perspectives on Semantic Wikis
characteristics of Semantic Wikis
example
4
Introduction
Wiki Principles
 wikis allow anyone to edit
 wikis are easy to use and do not require additional
software
 wiki content is easy to link
 wikis support versioning of all changes
 wikis support all media
5
Introduction
Nova Spivack: Metaweb
Semantic Wikis
6
Introduction
Two Perspectives on Semantic Wikis
 Wikis for Metadata
 Metadata for Wikis
no clear separation, but tendencies!
7
Introduction
Wikis for Metadata
 creating metadata on the Semantic Web is difficult!
– requires domain knowledge
– requires knowledge engineering skills
– complicated, insufficient tools
 Wikis for metadata:
– simplified technological access to the creation of
metadata
– collaboration of domain experts and knowledge
engineers
– dynamically evolving knowledge networks and
knowledge models
8
Introduction
Metadata for Wikis
 Wikis
 huge amounts of digital content (e.g. Wikipedia)
 strong connection of content via hyperlinks
 problem: structure exists, but is only used for
presentation and not accessible by computers
 finding relevant content is increasingly difficult
 integration and exchange between different systems is
difficult
9
Introduction
Semantic Wikis
 annotation of existing structures with machine readable
metadata
links carry meaning, typing of links, typing of pages
 context dependent adaptation and presentation
different domains have different ways of presenting content, personal
preferences, etc.
 improved, „intelligent“, search and navigation
queries to the structure, visualisation of structure, derived information
 improved interoperability between systems
exchange of content, integration of different systems, agents, etc
10
Introduction
Semantic Wikis: Example
11
History
History
12
History
1995: The First Wiki
 Wiki
 First developed by Ward Cunningham as an add-on to the Portland Pattern
Repository on 1995.03.25

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiDesignPrinciples  our interpretation
 Incremental - Pages can cite other pages, including pages that have not been written
yet.  network of pages
 Organic - The structure and text content of the site is open to editing and evolution.
 different from classical content management systems
 Universal - The mechanisms of editing and organizing are the same as those of
writing so that any writer is automatically an editor and organizer.  integrated
creation and organization of content
 Unified - Page names will be drawn from a flat space so that no additional context is
required to interpret them.  humans can remember names
 Precise - Pages will be titled with sufficient precision to avoid most name clashes,
typically by forming noun phrases.  names are quasi-unique
 Tolerant - Interpretable (even if undesirable) behavior is preferred to error messages.
 usability: novice users have less fear to start using it
 Observable - Activity within the site can be watched and reviewed by any other
visitor to the site.  exchange of meta-information
 Convergent - Duplication can be discouraged or removed by finding and citing similar
or related content. 
13
History
2004/2005: First Semantic Wikis
 Platypus Wiki from Stefano Campanini, Paolo
Castagna, Roberto Tazzoli presented at ISWC2004
 WikSAR from David Aumüller wins best Demo
award at ESWC2005
14
History
2005: Wikipedia became popular
Comparing search volume on Google Trends on 2008-10-22
15
History
2006: Wikis became popular
Comparing search volume on Google Trends on 2008-10-22
16
History
2006: Semantic Wikis followed the trend
Wiki
Ontology
Semantic web
Semantic wiki
Web Search Volume, Worldwide, 2004 – 2008-10-22, /!\ Scales are different between diagrams!
17
History
2006: Semantic Wiki as a research topic
 2005: [swikig] mailing list launched
 2006: First Workshop on Semantic Wikis: From
Wiki to Semantics [SemWiki2006] at ESWC2006,
Budva, Montenrego
 2006: Second Workshop on Semantic Wikis: Wikibased Knowledge-Engineering [WibKe2006] at
WikiSym 2006 in Odense, Denmark
 2008: Third Workshop on Semantic Wikis: The Wiki
Way of Semantics [SemWiki2008] at ESWC2008,
Tenerife
http://semwiki.org
18
State of the Art
State of the Art
19
State of the Art
What is a Semantic Wiki? I/II
 Semantic Wikis* try to combine the strengths of
 Semantic Web
– machine processable,
– data integration
– complex queries
 Wiki
– easy to use and contribute,
– strongly interconnected,
– collaborative.
 Emergence of Semantic Wikis from to sources:
 A) Semantic technologies for wikis („ST4W“)
– i.e. better navigation, better queries
– Most semantic wiki engines are here
 B) Wikis for semantic technologies („W4ST“)
– i.e. Ontology engineering, ontology learning
– E.g. Many papers on mining wikipedia
* http://Semwiki.org, Schaffert & Völkel, 2006
20
State of the Art
What is a Semantic Wiki? II/II
 A Semantic Wiki is like the
Semantic Web in a Petri dish
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Many terms emerge – how to consilidate the vocabulary?
Many people work together – how to achieve consensus?
Queries over multiple resources
Import of semantic web data
Export to other semantic web tools
Versioning
Access rights
Trust
...
21
State of the Art
Semantic Wiki Engines
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AceWiki – controlled english
Artificial Memory – personal knowledge management
BOWiki – biomedical domain
Confluence Plugins (Metadata, Scaffolding) - commercial
Hypertext Knowledge Workbench – personal knowledge management
IkeWiki
 SWiM - offshoot of IkeWiki
 KiWI – successor in scope of KiWi project
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OntoWiki – free-form database
OpenRecord – free-form database
SweetWiki – semantic tagging
Semantic MediaWiki (MediaWiki extension) – Semantic Wikipedia
 HaloExtension – extension of Semantic MediaWiki, browsing & refactoring
 Semantic Forms – free-form database
 ... Many more Semantic MediaWiki extensions
 SWOOKI – a peer-to-peer based SemWiki
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Wiki_State_Of_The_Art
22
State of the Art
SemWiki2006 Results
 How is metadata created?
 Incentives for creating formal data
 Low in semantic web, higher in semantic wikis with direct benefit
 Page vs. Concept
 How is metadata used?
 Trust - Can trustworthiness of article content be determined from the
article metadata?
 Navigation - alternative views on the data
 Search …
 Automated content generation including reasoning
 Ontology engineering
 Why/for what are Semantic Wikis used?
 Like normal wikis, but more sophisticated, doing everything better
 Integration
 Integartion of structured text and RDF world still unsolved
 No common wiki metadata ontology
23
State of the Art
SemWiki2008
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 More application oriented than 2006
Alexandre Passant and Philippe Laublet.
Towards an Interlinked Semantic Wiki Farm
Christoph Lange.
Mathematical Semantic Markup in a Wiki:
The Roles of Symbols and Notations
Max Völkel.
Hypertext Knowledge Workbench
Andrea Bonomi, Alessandro Mosca, Matteo
Palmonari and Giuseppe Vizzari.
Integrating a Wiki in an Ontology Driven
Web Site: Approach, Architecture and
Application in the Archaeological Domain
Jochen Reutelshoefer, Joachim Baumeister
and Frank Puppe.
Ad-Hoc Knowledge Engineering with
Semantic Knowledge Wikis
Christoph Lange, Sean McLaughlin and
Florian Rabe.
Flyspeck in a Semantic Wiki
Cezary Kaliszyk, Pierre Corbineau, Freek
Wiedijk, James McKinna and Herman
Geuvers.
A real Semantic Web for mathematics
deserves a real semantics
Florian Schmedding, Christoph Hanke and
Thomas Hornung.
RDF Authoring in Wikis
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Axel Rauschmayer.
Next-Generation Wikis: What Users Expect;
How RDF Helps
Malte Kiesel, Sven Schwarz, Ludger van Elst and
Georg Buscher.
Using Attention and Context Information for
Annotations in a Semantic Wiki
Karsten Dello, Lyndon Nixon and Robert
Tolksdorf.
Extending the Makna Semantic Wiki to support
workflows
Tobias Kuhn.
AceWiki: Collaborative Ontology Management
in Controlled Natural Language
Sau Dan Lee, Patrick Yee, Thomas Lee, David
Cheung and Wenjun Yuan.
Descriptive Schema: Semantics-based Query
Answering
Markus Luczak-Rösch and Ralf Heese.
A Generic Corporate Ontology Lifecycle
Charbel Rahhal, Hala Skaf-Molli and Pascal Molli.
SWOOKI: A Peer-to-peer Semantic Wiki
Gero Scholz. Semantic MediaWiki with Property
Clusters
Joshua Bacher, Robert Hoehndorf and Janet
Kelso. BOWiki: ontology-based semantic wiki
with ABox reasoning
24
Trends
Semantic Wikis: Trends
25
Trends
Semantic Wikis: Trends
 Application Areas
what kinds of application areas can be addressed by Semantic Wikis?
 Platform
what kinds of software will Semantic Wikis develop into?
 Technology
what kinds of technological development/improvements will Semantic
Wikis see?
26
Trends
Application Areas
27
Trends
Application Areas
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Knowledge Management
Semantic Wikipedia / Semantic Encyclopaedia
eLearning
Ontology Engineering
28
Trends
Knowledge Management
 for me: primary application area
 from “knowledge is power” to “sharing is power”
 supporting the user by semantic technologies
29
Trends
Knowledge Management: Examples
 connect software documentation (design
documents, code documentation) about
components with relevant bug reports and present
developer a summary view of his tasks
 allow project managers in consultancies to share
project knowledge, e.g. “look for projects that are
similar to mine” or “generate instances of all
relevant QM process definitions for my project
setup”
30
Trends
Knowledge Management: Examples
 allow project managers to modify project workplan
in different ways, e.g. as a table, as a Gantt
diagram, … with direct connection to ERP system
 allow head of department to get a summary view
over all projects
31
Trends
Knowledge Management: Challenges
 different perspectives on same content
 integration with existing tools (and here the
Semantic Web can help)
 requires heavy support for the user, e.g. extensive
reasoning, calculation, …
 often very formal environments (contradiction with
Wiki Philosophy)
32
Trends
Semantic Wikipedia
 making the “wisdom of the crowds” in Wikipedia
(and similar applications) accessible
 not restricted to Wikipedia, not even to Wikis as
technology (see “platform” later)
33
Trends
Semantic Wikipedia: Challenges
 requires high performance and scalability (i.e. little
reasoning)
 community needs to be convinced to make use of
semantic features (only if immediate benefit)
34
Trends
Learning
 ePortfolio systems: collection of learning artefacts,
reflection on learning
 collaborative story telling
 personal development planning and alignment
with actual achievements
35
Trends
Learning: Challenges
 requires functionalities current Wikis cannot
provide, e.g. collaborative text writing
 require lots of metadata for planning
36
Trends
Ontology Engineering
 make ontology development simpler
 allow knowledge workers and ontology engineers
to collaborate in one system
37
Trends
Ontology Engineering: Challenges
 allow different perspectives on same content
(ontology engineer: ontology view, knowledge
worker: domain specific view or wiki view)
 full support for ontologies and reasoning
38
Trends
Platform
39
Trends
Semantic Wiki Platform
 wiki as philosophy rather than technology: same
principle holds for most other Web 2.0/Social Web
applications
 breaking information and system boundaries:
integrating information and giving different
perspectives on the same information
 Semantic Wikis as generic platform for developing
many different kinds of Social Web applications
40
Trends
Wiki as Philosophy
 wikis allow anyone to edit
 wikis are easy to use and do not require additional
software
 wiki content is easy to link
 wikis support versioning of all changes
 wikis support all media
same holds for other social software applications!
41
Trends
Breaking Information and System Boundaries
 integration of different kinds of content in one
system (wiki text, photos, code, …)
 different perspectives on the same content (wiki,
blog, social network, tagit, …)
 users edit the system behaviour, not only the
content (e.g. widgets - zembly, custom layouts,
declarative rules)
42
Trends
Example: Wiki
http://showcase.kiwi-project.eu
43
Trends
Example: TagIT
http://showcase.kiwi-project.eu
44
Trends
Example: Blog
 no image (yet) but entries to wiki/tagit could also
be displayed in blog style (ordered by creation
time)!
45
Trends
Example: Social Networking
 user information in the wiki could be used as basis
for social networks (e.g. based on tags)
 information represented as foaf data (RDF)
 just another perspective on the same data!
46
Trends
Example: Community Equity
 Community Equity: valuation system for
community content developed by Sun
 content can be rated by users -> information equity
 tags inherit information equity -> tag equity
 users inherit information equity for their content ->
contribution equity
 users inherit tag equity for the tags of their content ->
skills equity
47
Trends
Technology
48
Trends
Semantic Wikis as Testbed for the Semantic Web
 Semantic Wikis connect the real world with the
Semantic Web
 Semantic Wikis are the “Semantic Web in Small”,
because a Wiki is “Web in Small”
 Semantic Wikis share many common properties with
the Semantic Web
 most technologies developed on the Semantic Web can
be used and evaluated in Semantic Wikis
(my challenge: if it is not useful in Semantic Wikis, it is
not useful at all!)
49
Trends
Challenge 1: Proof Benefit
 the Semantic Web and Semantic Wikis must show
how they are beneficial to ordinary users
50
Trends
Challenge 2: User Interfaces
 all users like simple interfaces; tools like Protégé
are way too complicated
 how to do as much semantics as possible with as
little user exposure as possible
51
Trends
Challenge 3: Personalisation
 semantic data offers the possibility for
personalising content presentation
 e.g. preferences, observed behaviour, context
52
Trends
Challenge 4: Tagging
 users like tagging (various reasons: simplicity, low
cognitive barrier, …)
 how to „lift“ non-semantic tags to the Semantic
Web?
53
Trends
Challenge 5: Revisions & Versioning
 essential aspect of the wiki philosophy
 much harder with meta-data than only with textual
content
54
Trends
Challenge 6: Reasoning
 how can reasoning support users?
 what kinds of reasoning are useful in Semantic
Wikis (guess: rule-based)?
 how to deal with performance issues (needs to be
close to real-time)?
55
Trends
Challenge 7: Reason Maintenance
 what rules are the justification for a triple?
 how can results of reasoning be explained to
users?
 example: background turns purple because a rule
says that all pages concerning “foo” should be
rendered as purple; user needs to be able to get an
explanation
 example:
Amazon “why was this recommended to me”
56
Trends
Challenge 8: Permissions, Trust, Provenance
 big outstanding issue of the Semantic Web
 reputation systems can help (e.g. Community
Equity by Sun)
 is metadata about metadata
57
KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki
Applications
Trends
 Software Knowledge Management: Supporting
Software Engineers in sharing knowledge (Sun
Microsystems)
 Project Knowledge Management: Supporting
Project Managers in documenting project
knowledge (Logica)
 KiWi Showcase: “KiWi PhotoStories”, a social
networking and story and image sharing platform
58
KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki
Technology
Trends
 KiWi addresses personalisation
 KiWi allows arbitrary resources to tag other
resources
 KiWi partly addresses reason maintenance
 KiWi addresses rule-based reasoning in Semantic
Wikis
 KiWi has a proposal for versioning and transactions
(implemented but undocumented)
59
Trends
KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki
 website: http://www.kiwi-project.eu
 contact:
 Coordinator: Sebastian Schaffert
([email protected])
 Dissemination: Julia Eder
([email protected])
60
Semantic Wikis:
The Wiki Way to the Semantic Web?
Semantic Wiki Mini-Series
 1st session:
A Survey of the Landscape and State-of-Art in
Semantic Wiki
 Co-chairs:
– Sebastian Schaffert (Salzburg Research, Austria)
– Max Völkel (AIFB-Karlsruhe)
 Thanks for listening!
61
Planning
Semantic Wiki Mini Series Plan & Dates
 Session 2 scheduled on 20th November 2008
Semantic Wiki Technology (1):
An introduction to some of the Semantic Wiki Engines
 Chair?
 Panelists (tentative): MarkusKrotzsch and/or DennyVrendecic;
SebastianSchaffert; TobiasKuhn; MartinHepp; ...(?)
 Engines (tentative): Semantic MediaWiki, IkeWiki, AceWiki, OntoWiki, ...(?)
 Session 3 scheduled on 11th December 2008
Semantic Wiki Technology (2):
Semantic Wiki Extension, Add-on's and other Enhancements
 Chair?
 Panelists (tentative): YaronKoren; MarkGreaves and/or Thomas Schweitzer(?);
JieBao and/or LiDing; PeterYim and/or KenBaclawski; HaroldSolbrig(?), ...(?)
 Engines (tentative): Semantic Forms, SMWHalo extension, blog, purple
number tag (PMWX), Lex Wiki extension(?), ...
62
Planning
Semantic Wiki Mini Series Plan & Dates
 Session 4 scheduled on 22th Januar 2009
Semantic Wiki Applications & Use Cases (1):
vertical applications
 Panelists: HaroldSolbrig; ...; ChristophLange; MarkGreaves; ...(?)
 Topics: Applications in Healthcare and Life Science, e-Science,
Mathematics, AI, Education, ... – panelists to brief the participants
on the "what," "why" and "how" of their semantic wiki
project/implementations
 Session 5 on Februar 2009
Semantic Wiki Applications & Use Cases (2):
horizontal applications
 Panelists: SebastianSchaffert and/or PeterDolog; ...; PeterYim;
MikeDean; ...(?)
 Topics: applications in Knowledge Management, software
engineering, collaboration and community support, open ontology
repository, ... - panelists to brief the participants on the "what,"
"why" and "how" of their semantic wiki project/implementations
63
Planning
Semantic Wiki Mini Series Plan & Dates
 Session 6 in March 2009
The Future of Semantic Wiki:
Trends, Challenges and Outlook (Panel Discussion)
 Co-chair: candidates - DeborahMcGuinness, RudiStuder,
MarkMusen
 Panelists: hopefully, all panelists from previous session
can join us in this discussion and to answer questions as
well
 looking for as many panelists as we can, 5-minute briefs
from each, and an extensive moderated discussion
segment
 issues relating to scope, KR, Reasoning, HCI, access
control, adoption, ...