From SemWiki2008

Description of the Field

Wikis are collaborative environments for authoring Web content. Some of the key aspects of Wikis are:

• they hide the complexity of Web technologies (like HTML) from non-technical users,
• their content is usually strongly connected via hyperlinks, and
• they allow for continuous changes of the content that are immediately accessible and usable.

As a consequence, Wiki systems are nowadays used for a large number of purposes, including encyclopedias, project documentation and coordination, and personal knowledge management. Wikis have recently become more popular than databases or blogs, according to Google Trends (graph).

Of the Semantic Wikis developed since late 2004 (Ontoworld describing many of them), around 12 different systems powering hundreds of web sites seem to be actively maintained. Besides, several approaches have been presented to gain semantics from Wikipedia (or other big, public wiki sites), or to enhance these sites with semantics.

The goal of this workshop is to explore and collect new approaches of adding semantics-powered features to Wikis or using Wikis to generate semantics, which go beyond the first pioneer steps of adding RDF support to non-semantic Wikis. Scientific papers on Semantic Wikis published in 2007 mention as hot topics: Connection to natural language processing, browsing strategies and a number of applications areas such as problem solving, E-learning, software engineering and of course knowledge management in science and in enterprises.

Semantic Wikis try to combine the strengths of Semantic Web (machine processable, data integration, complex queries) and Wiki (easy to use and contribute, strongly interconnected, collaborativeness) technologies. Goals are diverse and include:

• simple annotations of existing Wiki content;
• tools that guide users from informal knowledge contained in texts to more formal structures;
• full-fledged tools for ontology editing where the text is no longer in the focus of the system.

Semantic Wikis contain in an integrated fashion many of the core challenges of the Semantic Web community: authoring, versioning, interlinked data, semantic browsing, semantic annotating, semantic diffs, semantic search and getting overview. In a Semantic Wiki, such methods have to be integrated into a coherent whole, while still remaining lightweight and easy to use. In this workshop, we investigate how these challenges can be tackled in an integrated fashion.