KiWi – A platform for semantic social software
4th Semantic Wiki Workshop at ESWC09
Heraklion, June 2009
Dr. Sebastian Schaffert
Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft
sebastian.schaffert@salzburgresearch.at
http://www.kiwi-project.euhttp://planet.kiwi-project.eu

KiWi Vision
12/03/08 Joint KiWi Workpackage Meeting, © 2008,Sebastian Schaffert, Salzburg Research

“Some people say information is
power. Baloney. Information
sharing is power!”
- Vint Cerf, Google

The Wiki Philosophy
| core wiki principles:
| anyone can edit and contribute
| easy to use, low technological barrier
| content is easy to link (and thus related)
| versioning (information does not disappear)
| support for all kinds of media
| these principles are not restricted to wikis as in “wiki
engine”, they apply to most social software systems!

Breaking System Boundaries
| the KiWi system offers the core fuctionalities required by
social software systems:
| representation of many different content formats
| easy linking between content items
| versioning and change tracking of content items
| annotation of content with meta-data
| rating and commenting of content by users
| user management, user profiles, social networking
| personalisation and context adaptation
| searching and querying
… and more to come (information extraction, reasoning, ...)!

Breaking Information Boundaries
| integration of different kinds of content beyond linking
| same content shared and exchanged between many
different applications and even systems

Putting the User in the Centre
| tailor presentation and functionality to information needs of
the user
| different ways of accessing information, depending on context
and personal preferences
| personalisation based on user model (previous activities, …)
| use information extraction and user tracking for calculating
recommendations
| allow users to modify the user
interface by adding new widgets,
custom layouts, semantic forms

KiWi System:
a platform following these principles
| social media applications build on top of this platform and
can benefit from
| sharing content between different kinds of applications (Wiki
page can be displayed in TagIT, …)
| sharing functionality between different kinds of applications
(editing, versioning, tagging, …)
| interoperability with other systems due to semantic web data
formats

KiWi Applications
12/03/08 Joint KiWi Workpackage Meeting, © 2008,Sebastian Schaffert, Salzburg Research

KiWi Applications: Wiki

KiWi Applications: TagIT

KiWi Applications: Dashboard

The KiWi System
12/03/08 Joint KiWi Workpackage Meeting, © 2008,Sebastian Schaffert, Salzburg Research

KiWi Architecture

Content Item
| central entity in the data model, used for representing wiki
pages, images, comments, blog posts, locations, …
| represents human readable content (text, media) as well as
associated metadata (RDF triples)
| semi-structured RDF used to represent all relevant
structured data of a content item and relations to other
items, e.g. geo information, EXIF
data, authorship, replies, …

Model Layer:
KiWiEntityManager + KiWi Façades
| central component to access all KiWi data
| offers transactions, revisions, and storing data in relational
database, triple store, and search index
| allows to create KiWi Façades around content items
| KiWi Façades:
| dynamic, application-specific Java views on content + metadata
| one content item shared between many different applications
| implemented as Java interfaces with annotations

KiWi Services
| offer core functionalities of the KiWi platform
| ContentItemService: loading, updating, storing content items
| TaggingService: adding / removing (semantic) tags
| SolrService: facetted (semantic) searching
| OntologyService: maintaining ontologies
| SKOSService: maintaining SKOS thesauruses
| …
| implemented as EJB 3.0 stateless beans (mostly) or Seam
application-scoped components
| some of the functionality also exposed as RESTful web
service

KiWi Actions
| backing components for user interface functionality:
| ViewAction, EditAction, TaggingAction in Wiki
| StreamOfActivitiesAction in Dashboard
| ExplorerAction and TaggerAction in TagIT
| mostly implemented as Seam stateful components scoped
to conversation, page or event

Conclusion & Perspectives
12/03/08 Joint KiWi Workpackage Meeting, © 2008,Sebastian Schaffert, Salzburg Research

Conclusion
| knowledge management + wiki philosophy + semantic web
= KiWi
| KiWi system – a platform for building flexible semantic
social media applications following the “wiki principles”
| provides all the core functionalities
| allows sharing of content between applications
| allows to realise the KiWi knowledge management idea
| several applications exist to demonstrate the feasibility:
| (Semantic) Wiki – collaborative creation of content
| TagIT – geolocating content
| Dashboard – personal startpage

Perspectives
| more functionalities:
| inclusion of Sun’s “community equity” system
| sophisticated personalisation features (recommendations, user
interface personalisation)
| sophisticated information extraction: automatic extraction of
metadata, suggestion of tags and related content
| rule-based reasoning: users will be able to write their own rules
that influence how the system behaves
| more applications:
| KiWi Blog
| Social Networking Platform
| …

KiWi - Links
| Learn more:
http://www.kiwi-project.eu
| Stay up-to-date:
http://planet.kiwi-project.eu
| Try it out:
http://showcase.kiwi-project.eu/KiWi/
| Download:
http://kenai.com/projects/kiwi/downloads

http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/

Contact
| Dr. Sebastian Schaffert
| Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft
| Jakob Haringer Str. 5/II
| A-5020 Salzburg
| sebastian.schaffert@salzburgresearch.at
| http://www.kiwi-project.eu
| http://planet.kiwi-project.eu
KIWI © 2008, Sebastian Schaffert, Salzburg Research