Semantic Wiki

This is an attempt to translate this other post into English
Charles Nepote, as he notified me, builta prototype of a wiki engine based on some of the semantic web technologies and providing some somewhat « semantic » features. I appreciated this prototype a lot. It lets me imagine how the wiki of the future would look like. Here are some pieces of a dream on this topic. The wikis of tomorrow would…

  • …provide the semantic features of Charles Nepote’s prototype : complying to the REST style, one URL for every page, publishing both HTML and RDF representations of this page (it would be better to provide RDF within XHTML rather than beside, would’n it ?)
  • … be Blikis (also known as Wikilogs) with pingback and/or trackback and so on
  • …implement syndication of recent changes ; therefore they should produce distinct URLs for every update (every « diff » : as an example with URL like http://www.monsite.toto/2004/01/01/12/WikiPage for the 12th modification of the WikiPage, on 1st January 2004, whereas the URL of the WikiPage still remains http://www.monsite.toto/WikiPage).
  • « wikify » remote semantic data ; thus the page http://www.monsite.toto/DcTitle would contain a RDF statement (an OWL one ?) that would mean that this URL is the equivalent to the dc:title property of the Dublin Core
  • …allow users to easily produce metadata with the help of an extension of the Wiki syntax ; as an example, when a WikiPage contains the statement « DcKeywords::MyKeyword », the wiki engine automatically adds the RDF triplet with subject being the page itself (its URL), predicate being the URL of the « keywords » property as defined by the Dublin Core and object being the URL http://www.monsite.toto/MyKeyword.
  • …have search engine allowing users to explore the Wiki with a navigation mode similar to sourceforge’s Trove Map based on the semantic data published by the Wiki ; as an example, the user will be able to display all the pages that are related to MyKeyword and are written in French (because they contain the RDF statements equivalent to the following explicit statement made by users within the page : DcKeyword::MyKeyword and IsWritten::InFrench)
  • …have search engines allowing users to save their queries and explorations as agents (with their own WikiNames) so that other users can browse the same path of exploration as the user who defined the agent

I implemented these two last features as a draft of micro-application pompously called RDFNavigator for Zope, and base don the RDFGrabber product. It is very drafty so it is very incomplete, not documented, instable (because RDFGrabber is not particularly stable itself in my environement), so it may be difficult to make it run. Nevertheless, if someone dares trying it, I am eager to hear comments and critics ! :) By the way, I hope some day to make a more honorable product based on the integration of rdflib into Zope, i.e. based on Rope unless the Ticle project quickly provides a similar result within Plone.

Une réflexion au sujet de « Semantic Wiki »

  1. Ping : AkaSig » Wordpress is going semantic (a little bit)…

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