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SemanticWiki mini-series Session-6 - Thu 5-Mar-2009

  • Mini-series Title: Semantic Wikis: The Wiki Way to the Semantic Web
  • Session Chair: Prof. Dr. RudiStuder (FZI & Institut AIFB, Universität Karlsruhe) & Dr. MarkGreaves (Vulcan)

Conference Call Details

  • Date: Thursday, Mar. 5, 2009
  • Start Time: 10:30am PST / 12:30pm CST / 1:30pm EST / 7:30pm CET / 18:30 UTC
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Attendees

SemanticWiki mini-series Background

The Semantic Wiki mini-series a 6-month mini-series comprising Talks, Panel Discussions and Online Discourse. The series is co-organized by FZI Karlsruhe, Mayo Clinic, Ontolog, RPI Tetherless World Constellation and Salzburg Research, Austria. This represents a collaborative effort between members from academia, research, software engineering, semantic web and ontology communities. The 6-month mini-series intends to bring together developers, administrators and users of semantic wikis, and provide a platform where they can conveniently share ideas and insights. Through a series of (mainly virtual) talks, panel discussions, online discourse and even face-to-face meetings, participants will survey the state-of-the-art in semantic wiki technology and get exposure to exemplary use cases and applications. Together, they will study trends, challenges and the outlook for semantic wikis, and explore opportunities for collaboration in the very promising technology, approach or philosophy which people has labeled "semantic wiki."

This series of virtual events will dovetail into the face-to-face workshop: "Social Semantic Web: Where Web 2.0 Meets Web 3.0" at the AAAI Spring Symposium (March 23-25, 2009 at Stanford, California, USA - see: http://tw.rpi.edu/sss09 ).

See: our SemanticWiki mini-series homepage at: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SemanticWiki

Agenda & Proceedings

  • Session Format: this is a virtual session conducted over an augmented conference call.
  • Agenda:
    • 1. Opening by the Session Chair - Mark Greaves & Rudi Studer
    • 2. we'll go around with a self-introduction of participants - we will skip this if we have more than 20 participants (in which case, it will be best if members try to update their namesake pages on this wiki prior to the call so that everyone can get to know who's who more easily.) (All - total: ~15 minutes)
    • 3. SemanticWiki mini-series sessions 1~5 summaries - (5 min. each)
    • 4. Panelists thoughts & short statements on the Future and Trends on SemanticWiki's - (2 min. each)
    • 5. Q&A and Open Discussion - ALL (~20 min.)
    • 6. Summary / Announcement / Conclusion - session co-chairs

Session Abstract: The Future of Semantic http://c2.com/cgi/wiki? Trends, Challenges and Outlook

We are inviting all our chairs and presenters from the previous

sessions back to join us on the panel at this session, to share their thoughts, and to collectively take a glimpse into the future of semantic wikis, as pioneers, developers and practitioners of semantic wiki technologies and applications.

This mini-series has proved to be a fantastic opportunity for

practicing and potential developers, administrators and users of semantic wikis. This concluding session will being everything together, and help everyone look into what semantic wiki promises in the future as well.

See: Some of the thoughts on the future and trend of semantic wikis by our earlier speakers at: SemanticWiki/Future

Q & A and Open Discussion

Transcript of the online chat (during the session)

Transcript: (lightly edited, only to improve intelligibility)

Peter P. Yim: Welcome to the SemanticWiki mini-series Session-6 - Thu 5-Mar-2009

  • Mini-series Title: Semantic Wikis: The Wiki Way to the Semantic Web
  • Panelists:

o Chairs of previous sessions in this mini-series to summarize the outcome from their sessions,

and to make their short statements on today's topic (5 min. each)

+ Dr. Sebastian Schaffert, Mr. Harold Solbrig, Mr. Max Voelkel, Mr. Markus Kroetzsch,

Mr. Mike Dean, Mr. Peter P. Yim, Dr. Li Ding & Dr. Jie Bao

o Speakers from previous sessions of this mini-series to each deliver short statements

regarding the future of semantic wikis as they each see it (2 min. each)

+ Mr. Christoph Lange, Mr. Daniel Hansch, Professor Daniel Schwabe, Mr. Harold Solbrig,

Mr. JoelNatividad, Professor Kei Cheung, Mr. Markus Kroetzsch, Mr. Mike Dean,

Professor Dr. Peter Dolog, Mr. Peter P. Yim, Dr. Sebastian Schaffert, Mr. TobiasKuhn & Mr. Yaron Koren

Peter P. Yim: See details on the session page at: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2009_03_05

anonymous morphed into Daniel Schwabe

anonymous morphed into Rudi Studer

RudiStuder1 morphed into Markus Kroetzsch

anonymous morphed into Son Doan

Son Doan requests a private chat with you

Rudi Studer: We are having problems dialing in. The German telecon service says that the conference ID is not valid

Peter Dolog: hi all

Markus Kroetzsch: We are now using the UK line to dial in.

anonymous morphed into Yaron Koren

Markus Kroetzsch: Hi Yaron.

Yaron Koren: What's up, Markus.

Markus Kroetzsch: We are still waiting for Peter to dial in ...

Daniel Hansch: Hi everybody!

Peter P. Yim: Sorry guys ... I am slightly delayed ... I will be over in a couple of minutes

Peter P. Yim: slides just posted ... please refresh session page

anonymous morphed into Ed Dodds

Lars Ludwig: Hello there

Yaron Koren: Looking through the presentations, it looks like Markus and Max's is an old one.

anonymous morphed into Jesse Wang

Yaron Koren: From the 3rd session.

Sebastian Schaffert: Hi, I dialed in via the German line just fine

Markus Kroetzsch sees two people with their hands up. You can put them down again with the hand button at the bottom right, I think.

Markus Kroetzsch: We will try that too, back in a minute.

Sebastian Schaffert: yes, I could if I had not logged in again

Sebastian Schaffert: -n+d

Markus Kroetzsch: ok, we are back via the German line

anonymous1 morphed into Christoph Lange

Christoph Lange: hi, sorry for coming a bit late...

Markus Kroetzsch: Hi, we are just starting

anonymous morphed into Tim Finin

anonymous morphed into Mike Lang

Sebastian Schaffert morphed into Sebastian Schaffert

anonymous3 morphed into Daniel Redmon

Daniel Schwabe: Bullets for those w/o slides should are at http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SemanticWiki/Future

anonymous morphed into Jie Bao

Ed Dodds: Thanks to the conveners!!!

anonymous1 morphed into John Pacheco

anonymous2 morphed into Bobbin Teegarden

anonymous morphed into Christoph Lange

Sebastian Schaffert: there is also the 4th SemWiki workshop at ESWC2009

Yaron Koren: I submitted a talk for the SemTech conference, but they never responded, which I guess means that they rejected me.

Yaron Koren:

Markus Kroetzsch: You should inquire anyway.

Sebastian Schaffert: ero-training is the goal of every software developer, or should be

Yaron Koren: I did, actually, about a month ago - they didn't respond to that either.

Markus Kroetzsch thinks they filter "Yaron" in email headers

Yaron Koren: I knew it!

Yaron Koren: ...or "forms".

Ed Dodds: Is there a knowledge engineer job posting resource, either on Ontolog or else place?

Tim Finin: we'll continue to need knowledge engineers just as we programmers and database specialists

Sebastian Schaffert: but hard to convince companies that they need one, at least that's my experience

Sebastian Schaffert: thanks Rudi

Markus Kroetzsch: There will also be another SMW user meeting, maybe Daniel Hansch can say something on that.

Daniel Hansch: Peter, would you be so kind and show my updated slide later? (v1.1)

Peter P. Yim: @DanielHansch: I've got your updated slide online

Mark Greaves: Tim: I agree that we will need KEs in many cases; the question is the degree to which

semantic wikis can socialize some of the lower-end schema design applications.

Daniel Schwabe: I don't believe there will be a single "user interface" that is universally "good" for all

Markus Kroetzsch: Right, see item 2

Daniel Schwabe: therefore, we really need environments that make it easy to create customized interfaces

Lars Ludwig: we need one environment to customize, maybe

Daniel Schwabe: perhaps some communities may reach a consensus on some interface model that suits them

Daniel Schwabe: Why access only from other wiki *systems*, and not from any data source?

Markus Kroetzsch: Didn't he say this?

Daniel Schwabe: I heard Rudi say "accessing data from other wiki systems"...

Mark Greaves: Daniel Schwabe: I agree about the multiple UIs; we don't expect a single best interface to a RDBMS,

so why should we expect a single best interface to semantic data?

Your M-V-C work is quite cool in this regard.

Markus Kroetzsch: ok, we can check on the recording, I was more focussed on the slide

Daniel Schwabe: Mark Greaves - ok, but the actual challenge of good UI design remains

Yaron Koren: No, he talked about other data sources before, including desktop-only data.

Daniel Schwabe: ok, my mistake...

Markus Kroetzsch: The slides are here: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/SemanticWiki/SWiki-06_Future-of-SemanticWiki_20090305/SemanticWiki-Future--RudiStuder_20090305.pdf

Yaron Koren: That was early on in the talk.

Daniel Schwabe: yes, there is the URL to all the slides earlier in the transcript

Daniel Schwabe: I think this definition is missing collectively produced content. To me this is one of the defining notions of "wiki"

Yaron Koren: Sure.

Sebastian Schaffert: we had a definition of "Wiki Philosophy" in the first session

Sebastian Schaffert: it included "everyone can edit"

Ed Dodds: Anyone using twitter here? What hash tags do you use for Ontolog Forum related tweets?

Mark Greaves: Daniel Schwabe: I think there is enough diversity between SMW+, Knoodl, AceWiki, IkeWiki, SWiM,

and the other semantic wikis that our community is not well served by drawing bright inclusion lines

or debating terminological scope, even around a fundamental property like collaboration.

The marketplace is redefining our term anyway. I'd rather see us be inclusive about

the term "semantic wiki", leave it hazily defined, and let our various pieces of software speak for themselves.

Sebastian Schaffert: research has to be fun;.)

Markus Kroetzsch: +1 to Mark

Yaron Koren: I would think a definition of semantic wikis that doesn't include collaboration is not a definition at all.

Daniel Schwabe: +1 to Yaron - and that's true for Wikis, not just Semantic Wikis...

Mark Greaves: Yaron Koren: I use a semantic wiki in a noncollaborative way for my own personal information management, for example.

Markus Kroetzsch: Actually, my hoempage is a semantic wiki, but I am the only editor

Sebastian Schaffert: BTW, first KiWi open source prerelease: http://www.schaffert.eu/2009/02/27/first-kiwi-open-source-release/

(sorry for advertisement, couldn't resist)

Daniel Schwabe: Mark Greaves - I agree with the overall approach to the problem; I also don't believe

in very strong categorizations that serve no purpose.

Yaron Koren: Yes, I'm aware of single-user wikis, but the tools are in place for collaboration.

Markus Kroetzsch: Sure

Sebastian Schaffert: not necessarily

Daniel Schwabe: The issue is that if you really take away the collaboration infrastructure, the problem becomes much simpler.

Sebastian Schaffert: it always becomes simpler without cocurrency

Daniel Schwabe: exactly

Sebastian Schaffert: but still, wikis are not about collaboration primarily, they are about creating web content quickly

StephenDavies: (what slide are we on now?)

Mark Greaves: "Database" doesn't have a very tight definition, nor does "word processor" or other common classes

of software -- they more have a family resemblence and hazy boundaries. No one has an issue with this.

So I'd hope this approach is part of our semantic wiki community as well.

Daniel Schwabe: Hmmm, then wysywig HTML editors would be wiki tools!

StephenDavies: (ah, okay)

Sebastian Schaffert: there is tiddlywiki - http://www.tiddlywiki.com/

Yaron Koren: Slide 11 - interestingly, it's about "what is a wiki".

Sebastian Schaffert: a kind of wysiwyg editor if you like

Sebastian Schaffert: but a wysiwyg editor does not create a website, it just creates HTML

Lars Ludwig: take a CMS

Daniel Schwabe: Ok, some CMSs or tools do that - create the page, publish right away.

One of the really enabling factors in wikis is easy *linking* (not so much formatting, imho)

Tim Finin: FB and youtube don't seem to be wikis to me.

Sebastian Schaffert: yes, linking is crucial

Sebastian Schaffert: and then there is versioning

Yaron Koren: You can't edit other people's contributions in FB, YouTube, etc.; that's the issue.

Sebastian Schaffert: and (you can debate that) everyone can edit

Daniel Schwabe: So that's why some of the social software sites/tools mentioned in slide 11 would not really count as wikis

(from the easy linking pov). And, of course, editing other people's contents, sure.

Tim Finin: more like forums, then

Sebastian Schaffert: yes, but there are nowadays many corporate wiki installations where *not* everyone can edit

Sebastian Schaffert: but still they are wikis

Tim Finin: bossWiki

Daniel Schwabe: it's ok if you have some editorial control on who is allowed to publish...

Daniel Schwabe: functionally speaking, it's still collaborative content AND linking

Harold Solbrig: I think the history component is an important aspect as well.

Sebastian Schaffert: I often summarise the wiki characteristics as follows:

Sebastian Schaffert: - On a wiki, anyone can edit

Sebastian Schaffert: - Wikis are easy to use (buzzword!)

Sebastian Schaffert: - Wiki content is linkable

Sebastian Schaffert: - Wikis support versioning

Sebastian Schaffert: - Wikis support all media (that one is an extension of the old idea of web page)

Sebastian Schaffert: http://www.kiwi-project.eu/index.php/kiwi-vision/21-wiki-philosophy

Lars Ludwig: hm, I could think of a virtual wiki integrating personal statements without direct editing

Christoph Lange: I wouldn't call the feature "versioning" -- IIRC it was originally called "easy undo"

= it's easier to undo a mistake than to mess up sth. (and versioning is one solution for that)

Sebastian Schaffert: true

Daniel Schwabe: my definition - easy content and linking; collaborative creation.

Versioning is really just a way to overcome lack of concurrency control

- leave to the users to undo inconsistent updates, simplifies implementation.

Sebastian Schaffert: @Lars: Twitter?

Sebastian Schaffert: Daniel: versioning is much more important

Sebastian Schaffert: it is about taking away fears

Sebastian Schaffert: the fear of breaking things

Lars Ludwig: why not integrating twitter messages into a wiki

Daniel Hansch: The "rule knowledge in SMW"-prototype is online: http://ruledemo.ontoprise.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Daniel Schwabe: ok, but I consider that as part of "collaborative content creation" support

Sebastian Schaffert: if I know that I can undo my changes in a Wiki, I feel much more easy to actually contribute

Sebastian Schaffert: @Lars: yes, of course (KiWi)

Yaron Koren: I was smiling at the "breaking things", BTW.

Ed Dodds: Isolated components will be available to link with electronic medical records and

financial reporting increasingly done in extensible business reporting language (xbrl) as well.

Anyone looking at the medical banking implications of this yet?

Harold Solbrig: The versioning isn't just being able to undo - it carries the evolution of how the idea was formed.

Interestingly, discussions should probably be linear - time flows down the page, but core pages need history.

Markus Kroetzsch: The "Ask The Wiki" demo is still found at http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Special:ATWSpecialSearch (URL not on my slides)

anonymous1 morphed into JohnMcClure

Peter Dolog: just some thoghts based on above discussion. I think we probably need some kind of

a metaphor for semantic wiki. Looking at what the other wrote: Sebastian - quickly update content

-> I think this is historically wiki; Daniel: collaborative editing of content was probably added

after when CSCW peaple entered, knowledge evolution goes towards semantics a bit

(versioning vs. evolution? probably a discussion point too)

Ed Dodds: >> Lars Ludwig: why not integrating twitter messages into a wiki - Indeed, saw this a.m.

http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/News/Breaking-News/Wikis-get-social-52891.aspx on a product

(eTouch announces SamePage Version 4.1) that "functionally" attempts this,

although not actually with twitter or identi.ca/laconi.ca

Daniel Schwabe: @PeterDolog - No, collaboration was there since the beginning in Ward Cunninghams first wiki

Peter Dolog: OK, I am not excluding it. I think we just probably miss some kind of methaphor we could all ground too.

Markus Kroetzsch: A core aspect of Ward's Wiki was simplicity -- hardly any markup.

Harold Solbrig: As was the original HTML

Lars Ludwig: Ed Dodds: next step: integrate 'semantic' messages

Peter Dolog: ok, so what would be an equivalent simplicity to semantic wiki

Markus Kroetzsch: As Ward said himself, Wikipedia and others have moved away from this part a lot, but I think he is okay with this

Peter Dolog: simplicity in editing beyond content - knowledge?

Daniel Schwabe: I translated these into "easy content creation and linking"

Daniel Schwabe: So I really don't care what is the underlying representation - if I have a tool that makes it

very easy to create content, that's fine.

Markus Kroetzsch: Ward's wiki was not just "easy" (to use), its whole data model was extremely simple.

There was hardly any structure in the data it contained. Mostly links.

Li Ding: the notion of easy is hard to say

Daniel Schwabe: Hence, with wysiwyg HTML enable wiki content to be HTML, so long as people don't have to edit the source...

Li Ding: even editing with wiki require training

Harold Solbrig: Interesting now that I think about it. HTML 1.0 was more semantic than syntax.

The XML community argues that it "got off track" with the images and formatting information

rather than the semantics of the message itself. XML, on the other hand, made it *too* easy

for everyone to say whatever they said their own way. RDF & OWL etc. are attempts to agree

on semantics, but WIKI, in a way, is a return to the original HTML principles.

Mark Greaves: Li Ding: very well said, "the notion of easy is hard to say"

Li Ding: furthermore, editing in English is not that easy

Daniel Schwabe: Besides content itself with the simple markup, the real winner was the simple linking mechanism - reference by name

Markus Kroetzsch: but maybe maintaining a basic data model with as little strucutre as possible is not actually our goal these days ...

Daniel Schwabe: at that time, this was the difficult part to achieve in a simple way

Harold Solbrig: Agreed - especially the link to a yet to be created page.

Markus Kroetzsch: indeed

JohnMcClure: Core & definitional to wikis -- which seems not to have received alot of attention -- are namespaces.

I believe that public understanding of wikis needs to evolve, not be a revolution with too many concepts.

Thus, I suggest that the concept of namespaces -- as a form of strong typing -- is the next crucial atom

of info to be communicated.

Daniel Schwabe: @Markus - sure, I would not focus so much on a "data model"

Daniel Schwabe: @johnM - interesting point...

Ed Dodds: @ Lars Ludwig: next step: integrate 'semantic' messages >> yes, I wonder if the open ontology registry (Ontolog Project)

might be utilized to connect with tagging a la delicious, folksonomies, twit hash tags, etc. to help give context

to these semantic messages...

Peter Dolog: @DanielSchwabe: so our ultimate goal is then, what is now difficult on the content in the wikis

which semantics can make it simple

Markus Kroetzsch: @DanielSchwabe: I mean the basic structural model of the wiki content. In spite of all freedom

that users should have, technically there must be some basic "model".

Daniel Schwabe: that's part of it. Then there is the "consuming the information" part.

No good to be easy to create if it is hard to consume! which leads us to customizable interfaces

Markus Kroetzsch: s ConferenceCall_2009_03_05/Daniel/DanielS/

JohnMcClure: I suggest that IF ontologies are calibrated with (inter)wiki namespaces,

THEN ontology metadata can be reasoned, leading to interoperability

Daniel Schwabe: @MarkusKroetzsch - sure

Markus Kroetzsch: we see it!

Yaron Koren: SMW mostly uses categories and not namespaces.

Markus Kroetzsch: Well, it uses both but for very different things.

Harold Solbrig: We had to splice namespaces in...

Lars Ludwig: document annotation is no solution

Harold Solbrig: e.g. RDF_type or WINE_cabernet

Markus Kroetzsch: @ Peter P. Yim: my lightning slide is not linked online -- did you get it?

JohnMcClure: Yaron, yes I agree, but that doesnt distress me. The essential point

is that SMW needs to develop an ontology that describes NSs.

Yaron Koren: Markus - a minority of people use namespaces for data. Like Harold.

Markus Kroetzsch: Oh, I would not encourage this, from a technical viewpoint

Yaron Koren: Talk to Harold. And John.

JohnMcClure: because...?

Yaron Koren: John - I don't see why usage of namespaces is that important to you.

JohnMcClure: Because it is a container. Because it's already in MW. Because it is not new

Yaron Koren: You could say the same for categories.

Markus Kroetzsch requests a private chat with you

Markus Kroetzsch requests a private chat with you

Harold Solbrig: Two different notions of namespace. One is the Mediawiki ns

(Category, Template, Property, and talk analogs) and the second is ontology namespace (URI)

Markus Kroetzsch: Ah, that is indeed different

Jesse Wang: Yaron: I believe one reason people use namespaces is to avoid name conflict: say,

two pages: NS1:MembersList vs NS2:MembersList.

JohnMcClure: Harold, agreed. What is the difference my friend?

Markus Kroetzsch: @Harold: Of course, namespaces in ontologies often have no semantic significance.

They are specific to some serializations, but not part of the ontological content.

Sebastian Schaffert: and they don't say anything about the ontology

Sebastian Schaffert: they are about the URIs and not suitable for grouping ontologies

Markus Kroetzsch: (opening a file in an ontology editor and saving it again may sometimes change the namespaces that are used)

Markus Kroetzsch: The notion of "URI" does not involve namespaces either.

Markus Kroetzsch: They only come in in XML and some other file formats.

Daniel Schwabe: I guess what is meant is some facility to help "distributed vocabulary management"

Li Ding: isn't wiki a place forcing people to converge?

Markus Kroetzsch: @DanielS: Yes, the problem is that semantic technology standards are pretty poor on this task.

Daniel Schwabe: @MarkusK - sure, I was just trying to give my interpretation of the remark on using NSs

Markus Kroetzsch: yes, and I think it is a valid remark, just hard to implement properly using standards

Daniel Schwabe: @ Li Ding - yes, but converge != merge

JohnMcClure: What is meant is a hook to define context, the 'frame' through which a particular wiki,

or namespace within a wiki, is constructed.

Where else to define such context *in the existing framework*?

Li Ding: @daniel, right we do forced-converge or merged by mapping

JohnMcClure: Frankly I am most concerned with making swikis palatable as possible - Start with existing concepts,

like namespaces (aka context) and pages (aka resources)

Daniel Schwabe: @ Li Ding - I believe merged by mapping is more acceptable, hence the use of NSs to help that

JohnMcClure: we can all agree semantically what the 'talk' ns is for. Why stop there?

Am suggesting some additional foundational namespaces in addition to

the fourteen (14) standard ns's.

Tim Finin morphed into Tim Finin

Daniel Schwabe: Shameless plug - partial answer to point 2 (interface between dbpedia and semantic wiki)

- Explorator: http://www.tecweb.inf.puc-rio.br/explorator.

First step, exploring data; second step, create/add/edit content (coming)

Yaron Koren: @ Kei Cheung - well, some might say that a semantic Wikipedia might replace DBPedia entirely.

JohnMcClure: e.g., put one's formal ontology in a 'term' ns, controlled by KEs.

Leave folksonomies in the 'category' ns -- potential terms adoptable by KEs

Daniel Schwabe: @YaronKoren - sorry, I really don't believe that. They serve entirely different purposes.

I could see Semantic Wikipedia being based on top of dbpedia...

Sebastian Schaffert: @Yaron: which would make sense, why are they separate in the first place ...

Sebastian Schaffert: well, at the moment, DBPedia is based on Wikipedia

Daniel Schwabe: @YaronKoren (perhaps that's what you meant?)

Sebastian Schaffert: adding the DBPedia-way of querying data to Wikipedia would make sense

Yaron Koren: No, I'm talking about adding SMW (for instance ) to Wikipedia.

Yaron Koren: Wikipedia could then be queried directly.

Sebastian Schaffert: same result, isn't it (or even better)

Sebastian Schaffert: that's what I meant

Daniel Schwabe: @sebastian - one of the advantages of dbpedia is having a sparql endpoint.

It enables powerful interfaces such as the Explorator I mentioned above

Markus Kroetzsch hears echo

Sebastian Schaffert: yes, but Wikipedia could offer the SPARQL endpoint

Daniel Schwabe: In addition, you could always have the (Semantic) Media Wiki interface, as you said

Sebastian Schaffert: instead of having it separate

Sebastian Schaffert: I disagree with Mike - OWL must prove that it is useful or otherwise we dump it

Sebastian Schaffert: (my challenge ... )

Christoph Lange: one more thought about namespaces: I think they are needed if links should remain

easy to author. LinkByName actually requires one flat namespace, which is not practical

for structuring knowledge, but full URIs are hard to author

Daniel Schwabe: +1 to Christoph Lange

Sebastian Schaffert: @Christoph: link lookup can be done differently

Harold Solbrig: @Markus (wrt namespaces) - indeed, namespaces have no semantic significance, which is

why they work out ok as a part of the name itself. The key, however, is disambiguation

- especially when you are referencing outside resources that have not coordinated their names.

The classic example is the NCI has a class called "Agent", which includes drugs and other

delivery mechanisms. NCI_Agent is needed...

Sebastian Schaffert: I'll maybe discuss with you separately how we now do it in KiWi

Markus Kroetzsch: I agree with Sebastian, but I don't think OWL is just useful if it is useful in wikis;

actually, we would have very advanced swikis indeed if they are able to leverage

a technology as powerful as OWL. Maybe we are not there yet.

Kei Cheung: Yaron, my chat room page was blocked by other windows so I didn't see your comment.

wikipedia started with free text, so it's not a natural fit to semantic web even dbpedia

addresses some of the issues. If we start right using semantic mediawiki (instead of mediawiki),

we might be able to create a better dbpedia (neurodbpedia in my case).

Yaron Koren: Well, as far as I know DBPedia just uses Wikipedia's infobox data, which could be

relatively straightforwardly semantic-ized.

Sebastian Schaffert: ... or create a flop because people are reluctant to use it

Sebastian Schaffert: if it is too complex

Sebastian Schaffert: difficult act of balancing

Markus Kroetzsch: @Harold: yes, I agree; I am not sure how well this is supported by current tools, though

Harold Solbrig: @Markus I disagree. OWL, while it may not appear directly, is an important component

when defining the intended meaning of the semantic components. With OWL, RDF, ...

we have "Category" and "Property". That said, OWL should be under the covers.

Daniel Schwabe: I think we can build special purpose interfaces to create, edit and navigate data

for which we KNOW the (meta) schema.

Sebastian Schaffert: people absolutely don't care about semantics

Sebastian Schaffert: they have to be added in a natural way

Sebastian Schaffert: forms are one way

Markus Kroetzsch: in addition, people absolutely don't care about wikis

Sebastian Schaffert: tagging might be one

Sebastian Schaffert: exactly

Yaron Koren:

Yaron Koren: So what are we doing here?

Kei Cheung: faviki?

Daniel Schwabe: @MarkusKroetzsch, unless you are saying this "tongue in cheek", people DO care about wikis...

Harold Solbrig: @MarkusKroetzsch: We had to roll our own for the time being. Not only do we have

the namespace issue, but, one way or another, we have to know

that "Wine" and "Wein" map to the same core resource, so we need a notion of identity.

Kei Cheung: owl:sameAs?

Sebastian Schaffert: @Yaron: we care about positioning semantic wikis as a tool that people really like

to use without noticing that they are using a wiki or semantics

Harold Solbrig: I want to get to the same page in the end.

Sebastian Schaffert: @Harold: this becomes very difficult

Sebastian Schaffert: think of "Snow"

Markus Kroetzsch: @Yaron: That is why I think we should step back and consider the goal we have.

We gather valuable experience in supporting structured and unstructured content,

for trained and untrained users, in groups or alone -- we can define "CMS"

or at least contribute significantly to its future definition.

Ed Dodds: Folks don't care about "semantics" but they do care about "context"

-- they just don't realize they can be the same thing

Sebastian Schaffert: in Bavaria, we have about 5-10 notions of snow, in Iceland they have about 15

Daniel Schwabe: Good user interface are crucial to ANY interactive application...

Sebastian Schaffert: and in Saudi Arabia they probably have only 1

Sebastian Schaffert: +1 to Daniel

Sebastian Schaffert: user centred design

Daniel Schwabe: @SebastianSchaffert (Ha, in Brazil we have may .5 notion of snow, none real! :-Q)

Markus Kroetzsch: @DanielSchwabe: The people from the street care about the label "wiki" as they care about "Web 2.0",

but the cateogrization as one or the other type of CMS is not essential to them as long as it works

Daniel Schwabe: @MarkusKroetzsch - ah, ok

Harold Solbrig: @SebastianSchaffert: What we've done is created a 3 part identifier (NS_designation(code)).

NS is namespace ID, designation is language specific and possibly changeable name and code is immutable.

Note that links don't just come from other wiki pages (!). If we don't find NS_designation(code),

we look up NS(Code). If found, we build a redirect page.

Ed Dodds: A simple case is job matching a la hr-xml. HR still refuses to use "context" to match "job description"

with "resume" -- job seekers, however, do wish they would

Markus Kroetzsch: @Harold: I think I understand what kind of problems you would encounter there.

You want to work on syntax, when all SemWeb standards work on semantics

(i.e. letting you identify the entities you model, but not the names that you use for them).

Markus Kroetzsch wonders how many parallel side chats one can have while still being an attentive listener ...

Ed Dodds: Another case is the White House Forum on Health Reform Event on now http://www.whitehouse.gov/live2/

where about of the jawing is about differing definitions and cross talk

Ed Dodds: alot of

JohnMcClure: Special purpose interfaces (@Daniel) could be bound each to a namespace.

People 'get' that pretty easily, and understand that

Sebastian Schaffert: @Harold: but how does it solve the problem of owl:sameAs redirecting to the same page?

JohnMcClure: place:White House is SURELY different than article:White House and talk:White House

Sebastian Schaffert: concepts are slightly different in different cultures

Daniel Schwabe: @JohnMcClure - sure, that's one of the primitive mechanisms we use in HDEWiki (and more general in HyperDE tool)

JohnMcClure: each requiring a wholly different set of tools to make the goal (completing content) faster, better, cheaper

Daniel Schwabe: @JohnMcClure - there is a builtin notion of "context", and a way to customize the interface depending on the context.

JoelNatividad: Following up on my point about word processors - has anybody looked into using

the new document formats - Open XML and ODF in particular as a jumping point

JoelNatividad: for capturing semantically annotated data when creating documents

JoelNatividad: ODF has a metadata Technical Comittee

smishra morphed into Sunil Mishra

Sebastian Schaffert: yes, we even have an open bug tracker issue on this

Sebastian Schaffert: still open

Daniel Schwabe: @YaronK, can you post the URL to the website you mentioned?

Yaron Koren: Sure - http://opencongress.org/wiki

anonymous1: How is the UI problem related to the non-specific spirit of the wiki paradigm?

For instance, from my experience working within the biomedical domain I have see that tools

such as WIKI-Proteins do not facilitate any specific tool for the kind of information

they are meant to support. How could having more specific UIs help solving the UI problem?

Bobbin Teegarden: Has anyone tried to move the wiki ui from words and bullets to an interactive graph (with GIS overlay)

more like Gelernter's Mirror World?

Sebastian Schaffert: because specific is always better for the user than generic

Markus Kroetzsch: anonymous1, you can use "Settings" at the top panel to get a name.

Daniel Schwabe: @ anonymous1 - that's precisely the point I was making in my earlier interventions!

Lars Ludwig: name space? -- I call it mind space

Harold Solbrig: @Sebastian: Even with owl:sameAs, we still have to get folks from whatever historical or

language specific hyperlink they've got to the SMW page that defines the category or property.

The advantage of the identifier approach is we don't have to carry a history

of all names that have been used.

Markus Kroetzsch: oops, I misinterpreted the text field next to the hand button

Sebastian Schaffert: response:

Sebastian Schaffert: namespaces are not for semantics

Daniel Schwabe: @YaronKoren - is there some sort of schema underlying the "structured" portion of this website?

Is there a way to access the "raw" underlying data?

Sebastian Schaffert: @Harold: that's fine - my concern is only that it is not so easy to use the same concept

in multiple languages

Sebastian Schaffert: we had this in IkeWiki

Yaron Koren: @DanielSchwabe - not really, no.

Sebastian Schaffert: but didn't to it in KiWi after a long discussion

AlexGarcia: I suppose that also has to do with being able to define atomic components

of a wiki page, the page is the atomic unit of the wiki.

Harold Solbrig: @Sebastion: agreed that it isn't. There are attempts and claims to be able to do this, however,

in Medical "ontologies" such as Gene Ontology and SNOMED-CT. Also, what of Dublin Core and good ol' RDF?

Sebastian Schaffert: @ AlexGarcia: not necessarily, we also discussed heavily in the community how to annotate parts of pages

Sebastian Schaffert: take the Wikipedia page about the computer mouse

Sebastian Schaffert: it would be useful to annotate each section differently, because it is about many historical mice

JoelNatividad: @Tim: Great stuff! Would love to see what your team put together.

JoelNatividad: @Tim: Great stuff! Would love to check out the work that your team did

AlexGarcia: can u track changes over anything else but pages?

Sebastian Schaffert: @ AlexGarcia: yes, in KiWi we implemented versioning and transactions for metadata

Sebastian Schaffert: not 100% solved, but mostly

JoelNatividad: Actually, I'm currently working on embedding semantic metadata in the SVG XML files that SRF-Ploticus produces.

AlexGarcia: is there any literature on that?

JohnMcClure: Markus' concern is that an ns organization conflicts with

one's ability to 'categorize' things in multiple ways.

There are several responses to this. First, don't overlook the

impace of REDIRECTS. Second, consider closely whether the structure

of the ontology is ill-fitting wrt the implemented namespaces.

Christoph Lange: @ AlexGarcia: the page can remain the atomic unit, but then we need good refactoring workflows

in case a page grows more complex (and subconcepts emerge within a page)

Sebastian Schaffert: on the versioning? we are working on an article

Sebastian Schaffert: should be finished next week

Yaron Koren: Sorry, what was the question? I couldn't hear it.

Markus Kroetzsch: @John: My point is: categories already do that, are well known, and have support

by advanced UIs even for searching. So why try to use MW namespaces?

Sebastian Schaffert: @John: never forget the user

Sebastian Schaffert: who would find this useful? I would find it awkward

Markus Kroetzsch: @John: I agree that it could be conceived, even though it would not play well

with the technical use of namespaces now (e.g. namespaces cannot be added

from the wiki but only server-side)

Daniel Schwabe: @ AlexGarcia - there is a whole series of work on model-based interface specification.

If you want to get a flavor of what's possible, some is exemplified in our HDEWiki demo:

http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/SemanticWiki/SWiki-02_Technology-1_20081120/HDEWiki--DanielSchwabe_20081120.html

JohnMcClure: I don't believe there is any ontology for defining a category.

(Unless you wanna raise Topic Maps v Ontology debate)

Sebastian Schaffert: SKOS

Markus Kroetzsch: well, I think we are talking of different things here

JoelNatividad: In my ideal world, users will work on their documents using familiar interfaces and then

the knowledge is published on Semantic Wiki

Sebastian Schaffert: +1 to Joel

Sebastian Schaffert: intuitiveness means known patterns of use

JohnMcClure: yep, skos.

Further, mw searching does understand ns's and categories.

Certainly I acknowledge that there's a break with categories in some sense.

But this is called 'emerging ke' right

AlexGarcia: Hi Christoph, how could the re-factoring be done?

JoelNatividad: and other users can further annotate on Wiki, and if it can be done,

the annotations are round-tripped down to the document

Daniel Schwabe: +1 to Joel too

JoelNatividad:

Guoqian Jiang: @Markus, We are using RDF output from SMW for processing proposals generated from LexWiki

Peter Dolog: @Joel: And this is exactly also a big challenge for us as researchers

Peter Dolog: i.e. how to make it simpler to make

Jesse Wang: We are doing something at Vulcan.

Peter Dolog: because program we can always

Jesse Wang: Mark is talking on that.

Peter Dolog: but how everybody can do that?

Christoph Lange: @ AlexGarcia: in Wikipedia it is done manually. Whenever a subsection (e.g. history of Italy)

grows too large, somebody first puts a warning there (this should be rolled out to

an article of its own), then somebody else does that, and replaces the former section

by a short summary, and fixes links on other pages pointing to the subtopic

Markus Kroetzsch: we are also working on solutions for inter-wiki data exchange and integration

-- I would like to collect input on what people need

Christoph Lange: @ AlexGarcia: Now assume semantic structures on pages (e.g. saying this paragraph

is a subconcept of type T), then a semantic wiki could assist with that

Tim Finin: gotta go. Thanks for all the fish

JohnMcClure: @Sebastian - Users find it useful that place:White House involves its own set of tools

Markus Kroetzsch: we plan to release software for exchanging data between wikis (instead of copying it

from one wiki to the other by duplicating pages); use cases could affect our design choices

Guoqian Jiang: @Markus, we are really interested in the future plan for RDF/OWL backend of SMW

Markus Kroetzsch: well, feel free to write an email

Markus Kroetzsch: (I think the session stops rather soon)

Guoqian Jiang: @Markus, yes, talk to you later by email

Sebastian Schaffert: @John: how about the page about the place which is called "White House" involving

their own tools instead of placing it on the link?

Markus Kroetzsch: ok, just bear with me being slow processing mails; quite some of them these days ...

Guoqian Jiang: OK, I see.

Daniel Schwabe: @MarkusK - why not use LOD as the underlying basis to share content between wikis?

AlexGarcia: @ Joel: having a semantic structure supporting the generation of documents could

make it possible to produce scientific papers, for instance, fully annotated.

This could deliver an OLD environment over the paper. I think that when supporting

the generation of documents the annotation should happen naturally and without any effort,

the document being generated should be immerse in the web by means of relationships over

those data types contained in the paper.

Markus Kroetzsch thanks Mark and Rudi for chairing this session, and Peter for setting this up

JoelNatividad: plaudits to the all the conveners, Peter in particular!

Sebastian Schaffert: @Daniel: done by KiWi and planned for extension

JohnMcClure: Users find it useful that place:* is in effect, a geo database

That White House is an article ABOUT something (like the place:White House

that place_talk:White House is an article ABOUT place:White House, etc etc

Of course, you can see metastatements abound

AlexGarcia: Thanks everybody

Sebastian Schaffert: yes, thanks!

Guoqian Jiang: Thanks all

Peter Dolog: thanks everybody

Daniel Schwabe: @SebastianS - great, will take a closer look!

Daniel Schwabe: Thanks all!

Christoph Lange thanks the organizers and all participants

JoelNatividad: any news about 2nd User Group Meeting of SMW?

Daniel Schwabe: Bye all, thanks for the interesting exchange!

Markus Kroetzsch: bye

Peter Dolog: bye to all

Sebastian Schaffert: @Daniel: essentially, if you access the KiWi system with a client that

sends "Accepts: application/rdf" it redirects to

http://showcase.kiwi-project.eu/KiWi/linkeddata.seam?http://showcase.kiwi-project.eu/KiWi/content/FrontPage

Peter P. Yim: Great session ... Mark, Rudi and everyone! Thank you all for a most wonderful mini-series!

Sebastian Schaffert: or something similar

Yaron Koren: @Joel - I guess there's no news.

Yaron Koren: The plan was to have one in Germany in May or so...

Sebastian Schaffert: @Daniel: the key is to use URIs that are "local" to the server domain

Sebastian Schaffert: which can be problematic if you want at the same time use ontologies

Yaron Koren: We could have one instead in the U.S., if there's interest.

JoelNatividad: Count me in, perhaps we can time it with SemTech

Yaron Koren: Yeah... although I'm not going to that one.

Yaron Koren: Is anyone from SMW presenting there, do you know?

Sebastian Schaffert: Markus apparently tried to submit a presentation

Yaron Koren: That was me. Unless Markus did too.

JoelNatividad: I also submitted one but the passed on it as well

Yaron Koren: Oh. Maybe it's a trend.

JoelNatividad: like Markus said

JoelNatividad: mail filters

Yaron Koren: So, are you still planning to go?

JoelNatividad: I am. Particularly since Mark said they were planning to host some SMW sessions

Yaron Koren: Hm.

Yaron Koren: Well, I guess that's where the 2nd SMW user meeting will be, then.

JoelNatividad: Great! Maybe we should continue the planning on semediawiki-user mailing list

Yaron Koren: Sure, feel free to send an email. I still don't think I'm going.

JoelNatividad: k. bye all!

Peter P. Yim: bye everyone! a big THANK YOU to all, once again!

-- end of chat transcript --

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  • Conference Date and Time: 5-Mar-2009 10:46am~12:51pm PST
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