Towards an Interlinked
Semantic Wiki Farm
SemWiki2008 - ESWC
June 2, 2008
Alexandre Passant1,2, Philippe Laublet1
1 LaLIC, Université Paris-Sorbonne
2 EDF, Recherche & Développement
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Social software at EDF R&D
• Electricité de France R&D
• The largest electricity company in France
• More than 2000 researchers in its R&D department
• Lots of different people: chemists, trading experts, computer
scientists ...
• Informal and closed-world communities
• “Knowledge = Power”, due to its cultural history
• Enterprise 2.0 and EDF R&D
• Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms
within companies, or between companies and their partners or
customers”, Andrew McAfee, May 2006
• Find ways to let people more easily exchange information and build
knowledge collaboratively
• Introducing new tools and principles
• Blogs, RSS feeds, tagging, wikis
2 • Top-down vs bottom-up approach

Using Wikis at EDF R&D
• Users adopted wikis for their particular needs, as people do
on the Web
• Internal project management
• Corporate information
• Knowledge bases on scientific topics
• ...
• Usage statistics
• More than 1000 registered users for the whole platform
• About 50 wikis, 2800 pages, 60 active users
• Different wikis as some people want “their” wiki
• Closed, read-only and open wikis, depending on the communities
• 10% radio between consumers and producers (blogs included)
• Many people were not used to those Web 2.0 principles
• Both technically and regarding the cultural changes it implies
regarding knowledge management
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Technical limits of wikis for knowledge management
• Wikis search-engines can only answer plain-text queries
• Natural Language Processing algorithms must be applied to extract
information from current wiki systems
• Cannot answer questions about the content of wiki pages
• “Is EDF located in France ?”
• “List all companies known in that wiki”
• “Who’s working on tidal energies ?”
• Wikis manage documents, not machine-readable
representations of real-world objects
• Documents and hyperlinks instead of resources, relationships and
properties
• A gap between these two ways of modeling knowledge
• The Semantic Web bridges this gap and semantic wikis provide
ways to achieve this
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From documents to resources
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Existing semantic wikis
• Using wikis to model data using Semanitic Web principles
• Ontology population and instances evolution
• Adding RDF into wiki pages
• SemperWiki
• Extending wiki syntax to define annotations
• Semantic MediaWiki
• Assisting users with user-friendly interfaces
• IkeWiki, OntoWiki
• Using Semantic Web principles to enrich the usage of wikis
• Organizing tags to enhance information retrieval
• SweetWiki
• Powerful (querying, reasoning, enhanced navigation ...), but
raise usability issues in a corporate context
• URIs, namespaces, triples...
6 • People need something that work without aditional efforts

UfoWiki: Unifying Forms and Ontologies in a Wiki
• A semantic wiki-farm server
• Goals
• Provide a user-friendly interface to let users create ontology
instances and manage them in the wiki way
• Hidden semantics for end-users, using forms
• Use SIOC and MOAT to model wiki pages meta-data, so that it can
be integrated with other internal SIOC data
• A corporate SIOC-o-sphere
• Connect the meta-data layer to the data (i.e. content) layer
• Who wrote facts about EDF ?
• Reuse RDF data available on the Web
• Geonames.org, DBpedia ...
• Interlink data from various wiki instances
• While some wikis are private, their data is valuable
• Re-use semantic annotations to provide value added interfaces
7 • Macros, semantic search-engine

A form-based user interface
• Using forms to maintain ontology instances
• Let end-users focus on the content rather than on the modeling
• Avoid semantic heterogeneity
• Wiki administrators define form-based page templates
• Based on existing Drupal modules
• Flexinode (Drupal4), rewriting to CCK
• Each page corresponds to an ontology class
• Organization page => foaf:Organization
• Each field corresponds to a property or relationship
• Some complex fields can be used to define internal instances
• Some fields can be used to define MOAT tags
• Ease the process of linking tagged content to related instances
• E.g. acronym, nickname
• SPARQL autocompletion based on expected class type
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• Closing the open-world assumption, inference might come later

Using wiki to manage ontology instances
• Each created page yields to one main instance, and related /
internal ones
Macro interne
Champ avec
auto-complétion
Instance interne
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Linking data and meta-data
• embedsKnowledge: linking a sioc:Item to a graph containing
the triples that were create from this sioc:Item
• Using SIOC Types module for meta-data modeling
• sioct:WikiArticle rdfs:subClassOf sioc:Item
Meta-data RDF file
http:://athena/alex
sioc:has_creator
EDF Data RDF file
embedsKnowledge
dc:title
Wiki page A
athena:EDF
rdf:type http://sws.geonames.org/
geonames:locatedIn 3017382
sioct:WikiArticle
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Architecture of a single wiki
edit
User 2
Wiki page
B
Wiki page HTML hyperlink
edit A
User 1
Document layer
(wiki level)
produces
produces produces produces RDF
Store
RDF
RDF meta-data
RDF about page
RDF description
description
meta-data of objects Semantic B
of objects
about page embedded relationships embedded
A in page A between objects in page B
uses semantic link
semantic link Storage
Semantic Web layer uses
Meta-data
ontologies Data-modeling
(SIOC, DC ...) ontologies
(SKOS, Domain
ontologies ...)
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Interlinking data from various wikis
• All wikis share a common knowledge base
• URI identification across wikis
• Merge statements about URIs but keep source using named graphs
embedsKnowledge
embedsKnowledge
Wiki page A
athena:EDF athena:EDF
Wiki page B
rdf:type
http://sws.geonames.org/ athena:produces
3017382
geonames:locatedIn
rdf:type
sioct:WikiArticle athena:NuclearEnergy
sioct:WikiArticle
Wiki A
Wiki B
stores stores
RDF
Backend
merges
athena:EDF
geonames:locatedIn
athena:produces
http://sws.geonames.org/
3017382 athena:NuclearEnergy
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Using produced RDF data
• RDF data is exported to the triple-store when page is created
• Immediately re-usable and up-to-date data
• Inline macros
• Defined by wiki administrators, using PHP and SPARQL
• User-friendly syntax to let end-users embed it in wiki pages
• Eg: [onto|members], [onto|type,foaf:Person]
• Can be used to run complex queries about data from another wiki
• Eg: All activities of an company and related organizations
• Direct RDF querying
• Advanced users - User-friendly SPARQL interface planned
• Queries regarding data, meta-data or both
• Semantic search
• From keyword to concept
• Integration with other SIOC data
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Macro results
• SPARQL query results in wiki pages
• Subject of the query is the currently browsed instance
• Similar to SemanticMediaWiki inline macros
• Semantic back-links
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SPARQL-ing RDF data from the wiki
• Combining meta-data and content levels:
• All pages from the wiki #6 that provide information about EDF and
than have at least 2 replies
select ?page ?title
where {
graph ?data {
:EDF ?predicate ?object
} .
?page :embedsKnowledge ?data ;
rdf:type sioct:WikiArticle ;
dc:title ?title ;
sioc:has_container <http://example.org/wiki/6> ;
sioc:num_replies ?replies .
<http://example.org/wiki/6> a sioct:Wiki .
} FILTER (?replies > 1)
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Reusing RDF data available on the Web
• The Linking Open Data initiative
• Lots or RDF data available from reference data-sets
• GeoNames, DBpedia, riese …
• Using the same ontologies in a corporate environment
• Low-cost integration
• No need to align vocabularies and define mapping between them
• GeoNames wrapper
• “city, (state), country” fields mapped to geonames.org web-service
• Retrieve the location URI and its related RDF file (with coordinates)
• Simple way to create geolocation services and enhance navigation
• Provide interlinked RDF data
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Easy-geolocation with our GeoNames wrapper
• Combining geolocation and macro-queries
• Location of any member of the currently browsed organization
• [onto|mapmembers] => SPARQL + rendering
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Querying the internal SIOC-o-sphere
• Combining SIOC-based information from various data sources
• Find relevant resource from given keyword with MOAT
• Retrieves main / related wiki pages from different wikis
• Retrieve “tagged” blog posts
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Conclusion
• Overview of our approach
• User-friendly interface with forms mapped to ontologies
• SIOC-based meta-data to ease integration with existing SIOC data
• Combining meta-data and data (content) layer
• Interlinking data from various wiki instances
• Using existing RDF data and vocabularies for value-added service
• What’s next ?
• Validate forms using the underlying ontologies
• User-interface to define macros
• Linking / reusing more LOD data
• Use SIOC in other wikis as a meta-data model
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Thank you !
Any questions ?
slides @ http://apassant.net
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