From SemWiki2008

Goals and Objectives

Now, after more than three years of research on Semantic Wikis, which has yielded a great diversity of approaches and solutions, the time has come to critically review these results, e.g. against the original wiki principles (as established by Ward Cunningham and other wiki pioneers; bold in the list below) and pose new research questions about how these principles can really be leveraged with semantic technologies:

• Collaborative Authoring: Wiki content is editable by all – whoever “all” means: How can semantic techniques help to manage permissions? Are there semantic approaches to licensing? How do Semantic Wikis cope with inconsistent knowledge? Beyond easy text input via a simple text syntax or WYSIWYG editors, how can semantic information help to offer better assistance for editing, annotating, structuring? How can wiki syntax ideas be exploited for semantic authoring?
• Changes: How do we get from “recently changed pages” to “recently changed resources” or even better “really hot topics”? How can the “quick diffs” between two versions evolve from syntax to semantics? What kinds of page edits change the semantics? How can these changes be identified and what effects on other parts of the knowledge base do they have? How to convey semantic changes to a user?
• Links: so-called “Automatic link generation” in wikis just recognizes SpecialSyntacticalPatterns (called WikiWords or CamelCase). Backlinks allow to browse links in backward direction, too. What other ways to create, infer, and use links are possible or required in a semantic wiki?
• Retrieval: Wikis support finding pages by title and contents. In Semantic Wikis, how can IR-based search methods be combined with semantic search approaches? What browsing methods in semantic wikis can give the user a better sense of overview than simple page lists?

From a social point of view, we want to investigate how Semantic Wikis can help to boost the success of Wikis as “weapons of mass collaboration” (Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics). Mass collaboration with Wikis has already been extremely successful, even with quite simple technology: large, world-public Wikis like Wikipedia, the biggest encyclopedia of the world, consulted every day by hundred of thousands of visitors, or the Wikis used by most open source projects, as well as enterprise-public intranets used by e.g. Motorola, Google, or SAP. Studying these success stories may help to point out new potential improvements.

Personal wikis begin to become popular as a new kind of personal information management (PIM) tool. Now the challenge is to use Semantic Web technologies to connect the different information spaces and turn them into one global collaborative read-write-query knowledge space accessible to everyone, be it humans or agents.