Semantic Enablement of Wikis for Enterprise Information Integration

Yesterday, I gave a "lightning talk" (3 min prezo) at SemanticWiki mini-series Session-2 hosted by Ontolog.  It was interesting to hear the evolution of semantic wikis to date and the varied focus and unique applications offered by various organizations.  Its even more interesting that with all that these wikis promise, they have not picked up much attention in an enterprise.

Here is the rough text that accompanied my presentation:

Our focus at zAgile is towards information integration within the enterprise -- towards which, the wiki is only one of many potential sources of information or knowledge.  Rather than treat the wiki as THE knowledge repository, we have developed technology and extensions which allow the wiki (as well as other applications) to contribute to a central information repository, although the wiki may also functions as a 'portal' or 'dashboard' for integrated information.  In this regard, we have focused on "semantically enabling" commercially deployed wikis such as Atlassian's Confluence. 

 

The semantic enablement consists of three major components:

1. Within the wiki -- it is Templates, Forms and Query support. 
   1. Templates are based on pre-defined ontologies, each one potentially representing a single concept, its attributes and relations, such as Artifact, Person, Task, etc.  Templates support pre-population of instance-specific data from the repository via embedded SPARQL queries
   2. Forms are based on templates, to allow users to create hybrid pages -- consisting of semantically structured as well as free-form content -- in an implementation similar to the work done for MediaWiki.
   3. And of course, you can write SPARQL/RDQL type queries and integrate and enrich wiki content with information from external sources.     
2. zAgile's ontology-based repository consisting of domain-specific ontologies (our current focus is on ontologies for software engineering)
3. zAgile's semantic framework which provides a consistent mechanism for all applications, including wikis to interact with the repository

 

The central ontology-based repository provides for unification of information across the enterprise, incorporating what so far has been relatively "unstructured content" that lives in the wikis and offers little contextual value. 

 

-Sanjiva, Prague, Nov '08

Comments

[master Saad]

semantic web has made it mainstream, cnn.com's front page is talking about it ! http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/12/17/db.semanticweb/index.html they effortlessly throw out terms such as web 3.0 and even SPARQL :>