A Survey of the Landscape and State-of-Art in Semantic Wiki

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Semantic Wiki Mini-Series 1st session:

Co-chairs:

Sebastian Schaffert (Salzburg Research, Austria), Max Völkel (FZI Karlsruhe)

2008-10-23

Semantic Wikis: The Wiki Way to the Semantic Web?

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Agenda

History

State of the Art

Trends Introduction

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Introduction

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Introduction: Semantic Wikis

 wiki principles

 metaweb

 two perspectives on Semantic Wikis

 characteristics of Semantic Wikis

 example

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Introduction

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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

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Introduction

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Nova Spivack: Metaweb

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Semantic Wikis Introduction

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Two Perspectives on Semantic Wikis

 Wikis for Metadata

 Metadata for Wikis

no clear separation, but tendencies!

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Introduction

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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

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Introduction

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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

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Introduction

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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

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Introduction

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Semantic Wikis: Example

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Introduction

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History

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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. 

History

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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

History

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2005: Wikipedia became popular

Comparing search volume on Google Trends on 2008-10-22

History

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2006: Wikis became popular

Comparing search volume on Google Trends on 2008-10-22

History

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2006: Semantic Wikis followed the trend

Web Search Volume, Worldwide, 2004 – 2008-10-22, /!\ Scales are different between diagrams!

Wiki

Ontology Semantic web

Semantic wiki

History

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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: Wiki- based 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

History

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State of the Art

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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

State of the Art

* http://Semwiki.org, Schaffert & Völkel, 2006 20

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What is a Semantic Wiki? II/II

 A Semantic Wiki is like the Semantic Web in a Petri dish

 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

 ...

State of the Art

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Semantic Wiki Engines

 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

 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

State of the Art

http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Wiki_State_Of_The_Art 22

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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

State of the Art

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SemWiki2008

 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

 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

State of the Art

 More application oriented than 2006

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Semantic Wikis: Trends

Trends

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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?

Trends

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Application Areas

Trends

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Application Areas

 Knowledge Management

 Semantic Wikipedia / Semantic Encyclopaedia

 eLearning

 Ontology Engineering

Trends

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Knowledge Management

 for me: primary application area

 from “knowledge is power” to “sharing is power”

 supporting the user by semantic technologies

Trends

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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”

Trends

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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

Trends

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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)

Trends

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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)

Trends

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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)

Trends

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Learning

 ePortfolio systems: collection of learning artefacts, reflection on learning

 collaborative story telling

 personal development planning and alignment with actual achievements

Trends

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Learning: Challenges

 requires functionalities current Wikis cannot provide, e.g. collaborative text writing

 require lots of metadata for planning

Trends

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Ontology Engineering

 make ontology development simpler

 allow knowledge workers and ontology engineers to collaborate in one system

Trends

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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

Trends

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Platform

Trends

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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

Trends

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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!

Trends

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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)

Trends

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Example: Wiki

Trends

http://showcase.kiwi-project.eu 43

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Example: TagIT

Trends

http://showcase.kiwi-project.eu 44

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Example: Blog

 no image (yet) but entries to wiki/tagit could also be displayed in blog style (ordered by creation

time)!

Trends

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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!

Trends

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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

Trends

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Technology

Trends

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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!)

Trends

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Challenge 1: Proof Benefit

 the Semantic Web and Semantic Wikis must show how they are beneficial to ordinary users

Trends

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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

Trends

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Challenge 3: Personalisation

 semantic data offers the possibility for personalising content presentation

 e.g. preferences, observed behaviour, context

Trends

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Challenge 4: Tagging

 users like tagging (various reasons: simplicity, low cognitive barrier, …)

 how to „lift“ non-semantic tags to the Semantic Web?

Trends

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Challenge 5: Revisions & Versioning

 essential aspect of the wiki philosophy

 much harder with meta-data than only with textual content

Trends

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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)?

Trends

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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”

Trends

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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

Trends

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KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki Applications

 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

Trends

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KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki Technology

 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)

Trends

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KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki

 website: http://www.kiwi-project.eu

 contact:

 Coordinator: Sebastian Schaffert

(sebastian.schaffert@salzburgresearch.at)

 Dissemination: Julia Eder

(julia.eder@salzburgresearch.at)

Trends

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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 (AIFB-Karlsruhe)

 Thanks for listening!

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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(?), ...

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Planning

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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

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Planning

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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, ...

Planning