Days 3 and 4 of the OntoWikiKickOff Meeting in Leipzig were comprised of semantic technologies and OntoWiki development workshops.
Just like the overall organization of the project meeting was very good, so Sebastian Dietzold, Sebastian Hellmann, Michael Martin and JörgUnbehauen did a real good job at putting the ideas behind key concepts of the semantic web across in several introductory SemWeb presentations. Their talks about various technologies from the semantic web stack like URIs, RDF and its serialisations, RDFS, SPARQL and some related tools were well suited to bring people who are relatively new to the semantic web up to speed. Links to the presentation slides can be found at the project page in the coming days.
Later Jens Lehmann outlined the new things OWL 2 brings, e. g. profiles, which are subsets of OWL 2 and which provide different degrees of expressivity and reasoning efficiency.
The last day started with SörenAuer’s presentation of their semantic wikiOpenResearch, a site where information on conferences, journals and scientists is pooled. OpenResearch is built with Semantic MediaWiki (SMW), just like our Social Semantic Web wiki.
While SMW is a very useful tool as it lowers the entry barriers for using semantic wikis, Sören also pointed out that in comparison OntoWiki provides some important features that SMW doesn’t have:
SMW doesn’t use SPARQL for its queries, but a less powerful custom query language, whereas OntoWiki has full SPARQL support.
OntoWiki’s UI has many widgets that support the user when entering data or new properties on a page (e. g. there is an autocomplete feature for suggesting properties)
With SMW changes to the wiki’s semantic structure often entail manual changes to many, many pages. With OntoWiki it is easy to e.g. change poperties at any time.
For the new version of OntoWikiSören and his team use the Zend framework and develop the Erfurt API to store and access RDF data. The Erfurt API supports SPARQL, versioning, caching and RDF based authentification/access control. It abstracts different stores using the adapter pattern, so it can be used with Virtuoso and any other store which has an interface provided by Zend_Db (MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc.) plus they are working on an interface for Redland. Find the slides for PhilippFrischmuth’sErfurt API presentation here, the API documentation here and Norman Heino’sZend & OntoWiki Application Framework presentation here.
Julian Jöris demonstrated how Selenium is used for acceptance testing. This is a very promising testing framework for web applications, where one can e.g. record interactions with different browsers and automatically run them as tests. Selenium has a Firefox extension to record macros and is integrated with PHPUnit.
Finally we had a very good discussion about our conX-OntoWiki integration use case and application ideas, so we left Leipzig with a pleasant anticipation of the coming co-operation in the project.
Semantic MediaWiki is being featured in issue 12/2008 of the German popular computer magazine iX in an article about wiki engines. It’s the only semantic wiki among those presented, and although it is an extension of MediaWiki (which underlies Wikipedia) – which is also in the article – it is discussed separately and thus receives quite some emphasis in the article. iX has featured Semantic MediaWiki before, more precisely in an article dedicated to it in 11/2007. It’s well-deserved, I think, considering the many sites which use Semantic MediaWiki.
It’s good to see that the visibility of Semantic Web is also growing outside academia and involved industry.
On the occasion of the recent publication of our book, Social Semantic Web, we have created an accompanying wiki for you to explore the contents of the book and obtain information about its authors. Staying true to the motto “Eat your own dog food”, the Semantic Web Company has used a semantic wiki for that purpose.
As the book is in German, the wiki is set up in German, too, but that shouldn’t be a problem for understanding the demonstrated features. For the following examples, we have created a mirror of our productive wiki, so don’t hesitate to edit and play with this mirror wiki (we might refresh it occasionally, so don’t write any data into the wiki that you don’t also have stored elsewhere). This tutorial is going to take you through the following SMW features:
Automatically created lists
Faceted search
Semantic queries
Entering data via forms
RDF export
So let’s see what these features hold for us.
Automatically created lists
A common problem in wikis like Wikipedia is the (amount of) effort it requires to create and maintain various lists like the list of the EU’s largest cities. It’s an equally laborious and error-prone activity to keep such lists up to date; as a result, there are a lot of useful Wikipedia lists we can imagine that don’t exist at all, like a list of the world’s largest corporations with a CEO younger than 35.
In SMW it is easy to create all kinds of lists with queries. This page for the book’s table of contents is an example. View its source to see the inline queries used to generate the page (click to enlarge or view the source on the wiki):
As a result, the list is generated afresh any time the table of contents page is called up. If the data on an article’s page has changed, it will also be updated in that list – while in regular MediaWikis one has to manually update the data in both places (the article, and the list), which, apart from the extra work, also makes errors and inconsistencies much more likely.
An implementation of Semantic MediaWiki in public administration reiceved a jury award yesterday in the final ceremony of the highly coveted multimedia state award (Staatspreis Multimedia) 2008 in Vienna: Centre for Public Administration KDZ’s platform for the cooperation of administrations (Plattform Verwaltungskooperation) in Austria, Germany, Italy and Switzerland received praise for its use of open, semantic technologies in their effort to further the collaboration between administrations and administrative staff. Those of you who can read German: read the response from Bernhard Krabina, KDZ, here or contact him here, if you’d like to learn more. The top state award itself went to HPC Dual, a combination of electronic and physical mail delivery.
Also published yesterday was an interview with Matthias Schindler, former member of board of Wikimedia Germany, at the occasion of the publication of a physical Wikipedia, i.e. a one-volume encyclopedia in print (publisher: Wissen Media, a Bertelsmann division). According to the English Wikipedia, “the volume is planned to include abbreviated entries for the 50,000 most commonly used search terms of the prior two years. The book is to be priced at 19.95 euros, with one euro from every sale going to the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation.”
The interviewers also asked Schindler for his “encyclopedic Wikipedia dream” – I hope his response will catch on in the Wikimedia chapters worldwide:
I would one day like to see a large edition of Wikipedia (including a German language edition), which makes use of the Semantic MediaWiki extension. The dream in a nutshell, without consideration of the current state of research and development: A wikipedia that can be read not only by humans, but also by computers, a Wikipedia that can offer concrete answers to concrete questions and that creates content individually for users, something that they can make use of; great if Wikipedia played the role of the first, mainstream Semantic Web application. While this is still in the process of coming together, there are enough other things for us to do.
(btw, my translation).
Concrete answers to concrete questions, a personalized Wikipedia – I am not even aiming that high at the moment.
How often do you think these need an update? And if a new hardcore punk band is added – will the creators of the new article think about adding it to the list? What about articles which make make a reference to or mention things that are or should be on a particular list?
As a list has the inherent claim of being complete, it shouldn’t be left to humans to create and maintain them – leave that to the machines! Vote Semantic MediaWiki for Wikipedia!
Sorry for still writing about last week, but the TRIPLE-I conference had far too many interesting topics to offer for me to be already through with them – promise, this blog post about wikis will be the last TRIPLE-I post.
An interesting use of wikis was introduced with the Moki plugin for Semantic Media Wiki, developed as a side product of the APOSDLE project. APOSDLE (EU-project leaders love their acronyms;-) aims to develop an Advanced Process-Oriented Self-Directed Learning Environment, which in plain language is a platform to support the process of learning at work. In the course of this project, a model of the enterprise knowledge had to be developed that was to be the collaborative result of domain experts within the enterprise and external knowledge engineers. The APOSDLE image video below conveys a sense of the complexity of the knowledge to be represented.
But on to Moki: As wikis are an ideal, readily available tool for collaboration, the simple solution was to build a plugin (Moki) for Semantic Media Wiki that allow to structure and engineer the domain knowledge. Moki is a hierarchy builder that supports drag and drop so that categories and relations can easily be fitted in place – the special benefit of using Semantic Media Wiki was that the structure of the generated knowledge can be exported in Semantic Web compliant formats. Apart from the browser, no further software is required.
The APOSDLE website doesn’t yet offer any information about Moki, but a description can be found in the conference proceedings: Collaborative Knowledge Engineering via Semantic MediaWiki, by Chiara Ghidini, Marco Rospocher (who gave the presentation), Luciano Serafini, Viktoria Pammer, Barbara Kump, Andreas Faatz, Andreas Zinnen, Joanna Guss, Stefanie Lindstaedt.
For those looking for good arguments for setting up a wiki in a global business environment: Peter Kemper’s keynote was the perfect primer for that. Peter, a Knowledge Management portfolio manager at Shell’s IT-Department, gave some insights into the process of their conversion to wikis. Before there were wikis at Shell, they had global discussion forums, connecting 20,000 people around topics and questions, which were intensively used – the question whether wikis should be adopted or not alone generated 800 responses in these forums.
Instead of going for team wikis, Shell opted for the encyclopedic approach and a wiki that would be accessible to anyone at Shell, and for using MediaWiki – which was, interestingly, the first open source software ever used at Shell. Peter Kemper named scalability and the lean architecture as prime arguments for MediaWiki, and they have indeed not had any technical hiccups so far. It was also an asset that people, being used to Wikipedia, know how to use the MediaWiki interface.
Examples of uses case with which the feasibility of wikis within Shell were tested were: Drilling salt, Geology of the Atlantic Margin, and Production Chemistry. Before that, the main media for maintaining and passing on knowledge had been emails and Powerpoint – not exactly because these were considered appropriate for knowledge management, but because of the effects these media had had on the communication within Shell:
With the advent of email, People wrote less and less memos. Less and less reports were sent to the archive, because people kept powerpoint presentations. If that same information, previously locked in emails and powerpoint, went now into wiki, it would finally be accessible to everyone in the company.
Peter Kemper allowed us a glimpse of the information their wiki held, for instance, about the Atlantic Margin – as geological structures are described, most of the information relies on images. It would be a nightmare to maintain this kind of information in Powerpoint! No offense meant: Powerpoint is good for presentations but not for creating and maintaining a knowledge base. According to Peter, with wikis Shell achieved six times the productivity in comparison to using Powerpoint, in particular due to the linkability of content.
Wikis also turned out to be the superior solution for the integration of curricula from an internal learning environment, as wikis support the modular structure of a learning curriculum. Furthermore, they are also a good means to sustain communication in the time between workshops or team meetings.
At shell, they even use wiki for instance for the translation of contracts into the requirements of day to day procedures – a typical contract in the business that Shell is in has around 400 pages, and it is probably not very likely that a single person is going to read (and immediately understand) the entire contract. In this regard, the wiki also serves as a tool to translate lawyer-readable prose into transparent instructions (and there are probably many more ways in which wikis can be used to support business processes, a statement also put forward by Rolf Sint from Salzburg Research; see his 12 seconds statement below).
A noteworthy detail about the integration of wikis in Shell’s IT architecture: If a user logs onto the wiki for the first time and goes beyond the disclaimer, a new wiki account is automatically created that is identical with his or her windows account – this is not about checking on people, Peter Kemper said, but about creating organisational transparency.
On the one hand, this reveals whether there are organisational units within Shell where the wiki is not as intensively used as elsewhere, meaning that these units probably have specific needs which need to be addressed first. On the other hand, people can (and do) also contact each other via the wiki, e.g. one can contact the person who created an article if one is on need of further information.
About stimulating content production: 60% of Shell’s employees will go into retirement over the next eight years, and with them knowledge that is needed in the company. They even asked and paid former employees to come out of retirement to work on the wiki – that’s what I call commitment to content creation and knowledge preservation.
The Shell wiki already has more than 40,000 registered users (with 150,000 employees in the company, plus contract staff). What is interesting regarding user activation is that the number of active users stays relatively the same, even if the number of users in total increases. Peter Kemper’s account for this was that content comes in waves, meaning that users are activated in those areas where fresh knowledge is generated.
Kemper distinguished three types of users: content owners who create content from scratch; content editors who often just correct syntax or make things ‘look nicer’; and information consumers. Kemper rejected the term ‘lurkers’ for information consumers as looking for information is an activity in itself.
Brief report from the 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ECAI2008, which was just held in Patras, Greece. We had great weather and roughly 700 participants. We even had some very good talks. And Semantic Web keeps filtering into other areas of AI research. Two of the four invited talks were heavily semantic. Monnique Thonnat talked about ontologies for boosting computer vision. Georges Metakides talked about the forming Web Science effort. Ontologies and the underlying logics played a prominent role in the Knowledge Representation sessions. And I couldn’t help but noticing that Semantic MediaWiki frequently popped up as a discussion topic in the breaks…
Sweet Tools is a comprehensive collection of tools and applications for the Semantic Web. It is maintained by Mike Bergman with help from the Semantic Web Company. [more]
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