A Second Generation of Peer-to-Peer Semantic Wikis

Abstract

P2P Semantic Wikis (P2PSW) constitute a collaborative editing tool for knowledge and ontology creation, share and management. They ensure a massive collaboration in a distributed manner on replicated data composed of semantic wikis pages and semantic annotations. P2PSW are an instantiation of the optimistic replication model for semantic wikis. They ensure eventual syntactical consistency, i.e. that the wiki pages and semantic annotations store of the peers will eventually become identical. In spite of their advantages, these Wikis do not support a mechanism to maintain the quality of their semantic annotations. Thus, the content of the semantic wiki pages could be inconsistent for many reasons: the merge of the changes is made automatically by the wiki not by the users, missing information or inconsistent information added by the users of the peers. In this paper, I present a semantic inconsistency detection mechanism (SIDM) developed for P2PSW. SIDM detects the semantic inconsistency of the annotations in the semantic pages and improves the quality of the knowledge and the functionality of P2PSW. It indicates not only the existence of the semantic inconsistency in the wiki pages but also specifies the reason of the inconsistency. SIDM also facilitates the semantic inconsistency removal by determining exactly the position of the inconsistent annotations in the wiki pages and highlighting them via a semantic inconsistency visualization mechanism we developed.