User:Jason Morrison/Thoughts on semantic wikis

Introduction to the ideas of semantic web and the utility of an RDF+Wiki combination

• Watch quick vids (10m total) at http://eyaloren.org/
• Read Wikifying an RDF Editor from http://hypergraphs.de/

Semantic Wikis and their ideas

http://ontoworld.org/wiki/Semantic_Wiki_State_of_The_Art_Paper

Eyal Oren is doing some very interesting work, and points out naive shortcomings in the majority of existing semwikis. Quote:

   Recently several Semantic Wikis have been developed, such as Platypus [22],
   WikSAR [2], Semantic MediaWiki [23] and IkeWiki [20]. These Wikis answer
   these questions in a rather limited way: (a) they allow only simple annotations
   of the current Wiki page; (b) they do not formally separate the page and the con-
   cept that it describes; and (c) they do not fully exploit the semantic annotations
   for improved navigation.

-- http://eyaloren.org/pubs/semwiki2006.pdf

There are a variety of subtly different implementations for embedding RDF in wikis and vice-versa, with a variety of end goals being entertained. (So, it's important to remember to keep our goals in mind when choosing among them!)

N.B. An interesting discrimination Eyal Oren (semperwiki) makes is between letting the RDF embedded in a page specify attributes of _that page_ versus specify attributes of the _object that the page is about_.

Rhizome

• http://ontoworld.org/wiki/Rhizome
• http://www.liminalzone.org/static/semwiki2006-28.pdf

SemperWiki

Local, single-user, but interesting concept. I needed a custom hacked .deb to run on Ubuntu 7.10 (see http://jayunit.net/2008/1/28/installing-redland-1-0-7-from-source-on-ubuntu-7-10, and my version of semperwiki-hacked.deb, not currently online)

Web:

• http://eyaloren.org/semperwiki.html
• http://ontoworld.org/wiki/SemperWiki

Paper:

• Annotation and Navigation in Semantic Wikis
• http://eyaloren.org/pubs/semwiki2006.pdf
• http://eyaloren.org/pubs/semdesk2005.pdf

Others

• "Platypus [22], WikSAR [2], Semantic MediaWiki [23] and IkeWiki" --http://eyaloren.org/pubs/semwiki2006.pdf

Ideas about producing views on RDF

• "Fresnel is a simple, browser-independent vocabulary for specifying how to display RDF models.":http://www.w3.org/2005/04/fresnel-info/manual/

- "Java engine for parsing and applying Fresnel configurations.":http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Fresnel
- "Longwell is a web-based RDF-powered highly-configurable faceted browser.":http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Longwell

• TODO: Read through/discuss BB specs at http://openwetware.org/wiki/Synthetic_Biology:Semantic_web_ontology
• TODO: Thumb through http://simile.mit.edu/ projects for funsies

Data [exchange] formats

• http://times.usefulinc.com/2005/02/18-xml-or-rdf
• Notation3 is a human-friendly triples format
  • "Notation3":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notation_3
  • "Primer: Getting into RDF & Semantic Web using N3":http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer
• Turtle is a RDF-specific subset of N3:
  • "Turtle (syntax) at Wikipedia":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_%28syntax%29
  • "Turtle - Terse RDF Triple Language":http://www.dajobe.org/2004/01/turtle/

Versioning

• http://ontoware.org/projects/semversion/ exists, and uses a quad-store, but I think that's overkill.
• It's probably best (for our purposes) to build it into the wiki/tool layer, as i don't think it's necessary to track versioning in the document semantics layer

User Interface

Regardless, SB-specific UI may be helpful (see later section)

Ideas for a structured, SB-specific semwiki prototype:

• Backend
  • RDF - http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/developers/rdfintro.html
  • Redland - http://www.librdf.org
  • ActiveRDF - http://www.activerdf.org/

• Q: Is there an RDF schema/ontology for SB?
  • A: not yet, but the BBF working group will at least talk about it, and the workshop in Washington this spring might have some ideas. I hope you can come to that. We could present a paper or poster on the structure of D2, or maybe even demo it. -Macowell 1/28/08 1:19 PM

idea: produce view-layer editing widgets that embed into a rich text editor using fckedit/tinymce/yui-rte as a base. --Jason Morrison 22:05, 4 February 2008 (CST)