SweetWiki: A semantic wiki

Michel Buffa (1, 2, 3) , Fabien Gandon (4, 2, 5) , Guillaume Ereteo (2, 5, 4) , Peter Sander (2, 3, 1) , Catherine Faron (2, 3, 1)

1 Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux, et Systèmes de Sophia-Antipolis (I3S) / Equipe KEWI
2 WIMMICS - Web-Instrumented Man-Machine Interactions, Communities and Semantics
3 I3S - Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux, et Systèmes de Sophia Antipolis
4 Edelweiss - Exchanges, Documents, Extraction, Languages, Web, Ergonomics, Interactions, Semantics, Servers
5 CRISAM - Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée

Everyone agrees that user interactions and social networks are among the cornerstones of "Web 2.0". Web 2.0 applications generally run in a web browser, propose dynamic content with rich user interfaces, offer means to easily add or edit content of the web site they belong to and present social network aspects. Well-known applications that have helped spread Web 2.0 are blogs, wikis, and image/video sharing sites; they have dramatically increased sharing and participation among web users. It is possible to build knowledge using tools that can help analyze users' behavior behind the scenes: what they do, what they know, what they want. Tools that help share this knowledge across a network, and that can reason on that knowledge, will lead to users who can better use the knowledge available, i.e., to smarter users. Wikipedia, a wildly successful example of web technology, has helped knowledge-sharing between people by letting individuals freely create and modify its content. But Wikipedia is designed for people-today's software cannot understand and reason on Wikipedia's content. In parallel, the "semantic web", a set of technologies that help knowledge-sharing across the web between different applications, is starting to gain attraction. Researchers have only recently started working on the concept of a "semantic wiki", mixing the advantages of the wiki and the technologies of the semantic web. In this paper we will present a state-of-the-art of semantic wikis, and we will introduce SweetWiki, an example of an application reconciling two trends of the future web: a semantically-augmented web and a web of social applications where every user is an active provider as well as a consumer of information. SweetWiki makes heavy use of semantic web concepts and languages, and demonstrates how the use of such paradigms can improve navigation, search, and usability.

Keywords: Wiki; Semantic Web; Social Tagging; Ontology; Web 2.0; Folksonomy

Domains: Artificial Intelligence [cs.AI]; Web; Social and Information Networks [cs.SI]

Michel Buffa, Fabien Gandon, Guillaume Ereteo, Peter Sander, Catherine Faron. SweetWiki: A semantic wiki. Journal of Web Semantics, 2008, Special issue on Semantic Web and Web 2.0, 6 (1), pp.14. ⟨10.1016/j.websem.2007.11.003⟩. ⟨hal-01154473⟩