This document discusses the development of a semantic wiki farm called UfoWiki. UfoWiki aims to provide a user-friendly interface for creating and managing ontology instances within wikis. It uses forms mapped to ontologies to create instances without requiring knowledge of semantic technologies. UfoWiki also links wiki page metadata and content to external datasets using standards like SIOC and MOAT to integrate data within and across wikis and provide enhanced search and querying capabilities. The goal is to unlock structured data within wikis for advanced usage while maintaining usability for non-technical users.

1. 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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2. 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

3. 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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4. 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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5. From documents to resources
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6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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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10. 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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11. 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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12. 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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13. 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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14. 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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15. 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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16. 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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17. 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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18. 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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19. 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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20. Thank you !
Any questions ?
slides @ http://apassant.net
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