Product Code Database
A semantic wiki is a wiki that has an underlying knowledge model described in its pages. Regular, or Syntax, wikis have structured text and untyped . Semantic wikis, on the other hand, provide the ability to capture or identify information about the data within pages, and the relationships between pages, in ways that can be queried or exported like a database Semantic Wikis and Disaster Relief Operations, Soenke Ziesche, xml.com, December 13, 2006 Semantic Wikis: A Comprehensible Introduction with Examples from the Health Sciences, Maged N. Kamel Boulos, Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, Vol. 1, No. 1, August 2009 through Semantic Query.
Semantic wikis were first proposed in the early 2000s, and began to be implemented seriously around 2005. A semantic wiki for collaborative knowledge formation, Sebastian Schaffert, Andreas Gruber, and Rupert Westenthaler, Research Report, Knowledge-based Information Systems Group, Salzburg Research, Austria, November 23, 2005 IkeWiki: A semantic wiki for collaborative knowledge management, Sebastian Schaffert, Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE'06), June 6, 2006 As of 2021, well-known semantic wiki engines are Semantic MediaWiki and Wikibase. Comparison of Semantic MediaWiki and Wikibase
The formal notation may be included in the pages themselves by users, as in Semantic MediaWiki, or it may be derived from the pages or the page names or the means of linking.
For example, using a specific alternative page name might indicate that a specific type of link was intended.
Providing information through a formal notation allows machines to calculate new facts, as relations between pages, from the facts represented in the knowledge model.
If the wiki exports all this data in RDF or a similar format, it can then be queried like a database so that an external user or site could, for instance, request a list of all fruits that are red and can also be baked in a pie.
The first known usage of the term "Semantic Wiki" was a Usenet posting by Andy Dingley in January 2001. Its first known appearance in a technical paper was in a 2003 paper by Austrian researcher Leo Sauermann.
Many of the existing semantic wiki applications were started in the mid-2000s, including ArtificialMemory (2004), Semantic MediaWiki (2005), Freebase (2005), and OntoWiki (2006).
June 2006 saw the first meeting dedicated to semantic wikis, the "SemWiki" workshop, co-located with the European Semantic Web Conference in Montenegro. This workshop ran annually until 2010. SemWiki.org
The site DBpedia, launched in 2007, though not a semantic wiki, publishes structured data from Wikipedia in RDF form, which enables semantic querying of Wikipedia's data.
In March 2008, Wikia, the world's largest wiki farm, made the use of Semantic MediaWiki available for all their wikis on request, thus allowing all the wikis they hosted to function as semantic wikis. Wikia offers Semantic MediaWiki hosting, semantic-mediawiki.org, March 12, 2008 However, since upgrading to version 1.19 of MediaWiki in 2013, they have stopped supporting Semantic MediaWiki for new requests on the basis of performance problem. Semantic Mediawiki gone from Wikia forever?
In July 2010, Google purchased Metaweb, the company behind Freebase. Deeper understanding with Metaweb, Official Google Blog, July 16, 2010
In April 2012, work began on Wikidata, a collaborative, multi-language store of data, whose data could then be used within Wikipedia articles, as well as by the outside world.
Some standard wiki engines also include the ability to add typed, semantic links to pages, including PhpWiki and Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware.
Freebase, though not billed as a wiki engine, was a web database with semantic-wiki-like properties.
What data can get formalized also varies. One may be able to specify types for pages, categories, or paragraphs or sentences (the latter features were more common in pre-web systems). Links are usually also typed. The source, property, and target may be determined by some defaults, e.g. in Semantic MediaWiki the source is always the current page.
Reflexivity also varies. More reflexive user interfaces provide strong ontology support from within the wiki, and allow it to be loaded, saved, created, and changed.
Some wikis inherit their ontology entirely from a pre-existing strong ontology like Cyc or SKOS, while, on the other extreme, in other semantic wikis the entire ontology is generated by users.
Conventional, non-semantic wikis typically still have ways for users to express data and metadata, typically by tagging, categorizing, and using . In semantic wikis, these features still typically exist, but integrated these with other semantic declarations, and sometimes with their use restricted.
Some semantic wikis provide reasoning support, using a variety of engines. Such reasoning may require that all instance data comply with the ontologies.
Most semantic wikis have simple querying support (such as searching for all triples with a certain subject, predicate, object), but the degree of advanced query support varies; some semantic wikis provide querying in standard languages like SPARQL, while others instead provide a custom language. User interface support to construct these also varies. Visualization of the links especially may be supported.
Many semantic wikis can display the relationships between pages, or other data such as dates, geographical coordinates, and number values, in various formats, such as graphs, tables, charts, calendars, and maps.
|
|
