AceWiki:A Natural and Expressive

Semantic Wiki

Tobias KuhnUniversity of Zurich

Semantic Web User Interaction at CHI 2008Florence

5 April 2008

Tobias Kuhn, SWUI 2008, Florence, 5 April 2008 2

Introduction

Semantic Wikis

Semantic Web meets Web 2.0

Shortcomings of existing semantic wikis

Hard to understand for people who are not familiar with ontologies and logic

Relatively inexpressive (mostly just subject-predicate-object structures)

Tobias Kuhn, SWUI 2008, Florence, 5 April 2008 3

AceWiki approach

Wiki articles in controlled natural language

Attempto Controlled English (ACE)

Easy to understand: ACE is a subset of English

Expressive: ACE covers a large part of FOL

Example article:

Public demo: http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/acewiki

Tobias Kuhn, SWUI 2008, Florence, 5 April 2008 4

AceWiki interface

Tobias Kuhn, SWUI 2008, Florence, 5 April 2008 5

Predictive Editor

Tobias Kuhn, SWUI 2008, Florence, 5 April 2008 6

Reasoning

AceWiki currently uses the OWL reasoner Pellet

ACE is more expressive than OWL

The sentences that are inside of OWL get a blue triangle; the others get a red one

Sentences that are in conflict with the current knowledge are not included into the ontology.

Tobias Kuhn, SWUI 2008, Florence, 5 April 2008 7

Inferences

Reasoner is used to infer concept memberships and concept hierarchies.

Tobias Kuhn, SWUI 2008, Florence, 5 April 2008 8

Usability-Experiment

Hypothesis: Average people are able to learn how to deal with AceWiki within a short amount of time and without the help of an expert.

Small-scale: 20 participants

Task for the participants:

Add knowledge to AceWiki!

only true and general knowledge

modify/delete the contributions of others, if appropriate

No instructions how to interact with the interface

Tobias Kuhn, SWUI 2008, Florence, 5 April 2008 9

Background of the Participants

“How familiar are you with the term ...?”

Tobias Kuhn, SWUI 2008, Florence, 5 April 2008 10

Results: Correct/Incorrect Sentences

Altogether 186 sentences were created by the users.

148 of them were “correct and sensible”.

Tobias Kuhn, SWUI 2008, Florence, 5 April 2008 11

Results: Sentence Patterns (neg.) superconcept

(neg.) assignment

(neg.) role instance

superrole

Tobias Kuhn, SWUI 2008, Florence, 5 April 2008 12

Results: Time

How much time was spent on AceWiki?

How much time was spent on the predictive editor?

Tobias Kuhn, SWUI 2008, Florence, 5 April 2008 13

Thank you for your attention!

Questions & Discussion