semantic search on heterogeneous wiki systems - short

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Chapter

Semantic Search on Heterogeneous Wiki Systems

Fabrizio Orlandi, Alexandre PassantUSS, Unit Social Software

NUI Galway – Research Day15-04-2010


Background

Social software allows people to connect, communicate or collaborate on the Web. Popular systems are discussion forums, blogs, wikis and online social networks

A wiki is a website that allows the easy and collaborative creation of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser

Wikis are widely used both on the Web (e.g. Wikipedia) and in the workplace (e.g. project management or customer relationships)

By utilising Semantic Web technologies in social software systems, we can create new methods for connecting people to other people and also to the information that they have created


Motivations

All wikis share a wide common knowledge, but they have different structures and implementations, platform dependent

They act as isolated systems, where information from one system cannot be easily integrated with information from another one

Several semantic models implemented within specific semantic wiki platforms

But they are all specific to wikis and not open to other social websites

We propose a new approach based on Linked Data principles to solve such issues and to enable semantic search across heterogeneous wiki systems


Our Contribution

We developed a system to enable semantic search across heterogeneous wikis in a unified way using Semantic Web technologies

I) We designed a common semantic model, based on the SIOC ontology, for representing wiki structure and contributions in RDF - Resource Description Framework - encompassing previous models in the area

II) We extracted semantic data from wikis developing data exporters for popular wiki systems, translating wiki information in RDF annotations (based on our model) in real-time

III)We built an efficient application with a user-friendly interface enabling semantic searching and browsing capabilities on the top of different interlinked wikis


Results

In total we collected more that 3000 wiki articles and 700 users from 5 different wiki sites

The system is capable to answer queries like:“What are the co-authors of user X and on which articles they collaborate?”“What are the topics and the wiki sites the user X contributed most in the past six months?”

The presented application allows for advanced and fast querying processes and hidden knowledge discovery

By applying Semantic Web technologies to wikis we show potentialities that cannot be obtained using the traditional Web 2.0 instruments


Conclusions and Future Work

We showed an overall benefit on applying Semantic Web technologies to wikis, enabling end-users to access the information generated by this process in a simple and transparent way

The presented work goes exactly in the direction of creating a collective knowledge system on the Web in accordance to the Linking Open Data project

Future work: To develop this system as a stable online web service To provide more details about the content of wiki articles To add to the system architecture a real-time search

functionality

semantic search on heterogeneous wiki systems - short

Technology