[wiki-research] Loaded questions about Semantic Wikis

[Desilets, Alain]

In your WWW presentation, you show an example where someone creates a wiki page about an event called RuleML2006. In that page, the user includes a link to the page for Athens, which is the city where the event will be held. You suggest that the syntax of the link should be modified to allow the user to specify the semantic nature of the link between RuleML2006 and Athens. More specifically, instead of just writing:

   It is held from November 9, 2006 to November 10 2006 In [[Athens, Georgia]]

You suggest that the user could write:

   It is held from November 9, 2006 to November 10 2006 In [[located in: Athens, Georgia]]

But saying that a conference is "located in" a place is not natural, so most users would probably write something like this instead:

   It is held from November 9, 2006 to November 10 2006 In [[held in: Athens, Georgia]]

This is only one of the many variations that "normal" people are likely to write. 

I think having end user create semantic web data may be possible, but we will need to provide them with a lot of help to make sure that they write it in the standard format. Programmers don't mind having to look through manuals to figure out the exact name of a class of a method. But "normal" people don't want to do that, especially if they are just writing a wiki page.

For example in the above example, imagine that RuleML2006 has been assigned to the conference category, and Athens Georgia has been assigned to the city category, then maybe when the user creates a link from the RuleML2006 to Athens Georgia, the system could automatically suggest a short list of semantic tags that are most frequently assigned to a link between a conference and a city.

This is similar to what Michel Buffa is doing with SweetWiki..

Alain

-----Original Message-----
From: Max Völkel [mailto:voelkel at fzi.de] 
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2006 5:16 AM
To: Desilets, Alain; wiki-research at wikisym.org
Subject: Re[2]: [wiki-research] Loaded questions about Semantic Wikis


> I agree---semantic wikis are missing a killer app that is convincing 
> to those who are supposed to do the work. I'd love to see Wikipedia 
> semantified, but who is going to do it and why would they? The 
> benefits need to be tangible to those who are going to do the work, 
> not some other party.

Well, you simply get more out of the data within your wiki.

I can not say it in better words than with this presentation I held at
WWW: http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/semwiki2006/smw/2006-05-26-WWW2006-slides.pdf

As a quick example, see page http://wiki.ontoworld.org/index.php/Category:Event
and scroll down to see different queries rendered. Then click edit to see how the queries are formulated.


Kind regards,

  Max Völkel
--
Dipl.-Inform. Max Völkel, Universität Karlsruhe / FZI
            nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org
voelkel at fzi.de   +49 721 9654-854   www.xam.de

*Second* Workshop on Semantic Wikis: http://semwiki.org/wibke2006