KiWi and more: Semantic Wiki Workshop at ESWC08

16.06.2008

Three members of the KiWi-project team, including SWC's Matthias Samwald on the programme committee, participated in the Semantic Wiki workshop that took place at the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) on June 2, 2008.

The Wiki of Semantics

It was the third installment of a workshop series that has meanwhile become a fixture at the European Semantic Web Conference that was held in Tenerife, Spain, this year. A total of six full papers, six short papers and five posters had been accepted for the workshop that took place on the second of the four days of the conference, June 2.

Matthias Samwald (SWC) and Sebastian Schaffert (Salzburg Research), who both served as members of the programme committee, were joined by Peter Dolog (Aalborg University), who gave a keynote in which he introduced KiWi, an EU project which seeks to bring together the best of both semantic technologies and wikis in order to develop a new kind of knowledge management system.

The project is worth € 3.8 million, € 2.69 of which are contributed by the EU, and was launched in March 2008. Industry partners are Sun Microsystems and Logica; consequently, the two use-cases developed within the project are devoted to knowledge management within software development on the one hand, and IT project management on the other.

The Avantgarde of the Laissez-Faire Web

"Anyone can edit" is the guiding motto of the wiki philosophy, and this slogan kept re-appearing as almost a battle cry of the wiki philosophers that had gathered to discuss the future of semantic wikis.

"Even though there are several similar, and probably competing systems under development at the moment", says Matthias Samwald, " the benefit of the application of semantic technologies is that they are designed to mutually support and benefit from each other."

The KiWi-system is going to build on its predecessor IkeWiki, an open source Semantic Wiki that was developed under the auspices of Sebastian Schaffert at Salzburg Research.

A different, and as such complementary perspective, was brought in by AceWiki, introduced by Tobias Kuhn, which is a wiki that uses the controlled natural language ACE (Attempto Controlled English). ACE was developed to allow users to express professional texts precisely, and in the terms of their respective application domain. ACE thus is a subset of standard English, and not only can ACE texts be read and understood by anybody, they can also be logically interpreted and checked by an integrated reasoner (Pellet).

The workshop's best paper award went to Alexandre Passant's and Philippe Laublet's "Towards an Interlinked Semantic Wiki Farm.” The idea of having a Semantic Wiki farm means to have different interfaces and different wikis behind them, and to interlink these wikis in such a way that they virtually become one. The symbolic prize for the best paper: four kiwis. Enjoy them in good health!

Picture below: Peter Dolog during his keynote