Supporting Personal Semantic Annotations in P2P Semantic Wikis

Abstract

In this paper, we propose to extend Peer-to-Peer Semantic Wikis with personal semantic annotations. Semantic Wikis are one of the most successful Semantic Web applications. In semantic wikis, wikis pages are annotated with semantic data to facilitate the navigation, information retrieving and ontology emerging. Semantic data represents the shared knowledge base which describes the common understanding of the community. However, in a collaborative knowledge building process the knowledge is basically created by individuals who are involved in a social process. Therefore, it is fundamental to support personal knowledge building in a differentiated way. Currently there are no available semantic wikis that support both personal and shared understandings. In order to overcome this problem, we propose a P2P collaborative knowledge building process and extend semantic wikis with personal annotations facilities to express personal understanding. In this paper, we detail the personal semantic annotation model and show its implementation in P2P semantic wikis. We also detail an evaluation study which shows that personal annotations demand less cognitive efforts than semantic data and are very useful to enrich the shared knowledge base.