SweetWiki: A Semantic Wiki

Abstract

Everyone agrees that user interactions and social networks are among the cornerstones of 2.0. Web 2.0 applications generally run in a web browser, propose dynamic content with rich user interfaces, offer means to easily add or edit content of the web site they belong to and present social network aspects. Well-known applications that have helped spread Web 2.0 are blogs, wikis, and image/video sharing sites; they have dramatically increased sharing and participation among web users. It is possible to build knowledge using tools that can help analyze users' behavior behind the scenes: what they do, what they know, what they want. Tools that help share this knowledge across a network, and that can reason on that knowledge, will lead to users who can better use the knowledge available, i.e., to smarter users. Wikipedia, a wildly successful example of web technology, has helped knowledge-sharing between people by letting individuals freely create and modify its content. But Wikipedia is designed for people - today's software cannot understand and reason on Wikipedia's content. In parallel, the web, a set of technologies that help knowledge-sharing across the web between different applications, is starting to gain attraction. Researchers have only recently started working on the concept of a wiki, mixing the advantages of the wiki and the technologies of the semantic web. In this paper we will present a state-of- the-art of semantic wikis, and we will introduce SweetWiki, an example of an application reconciling two trends of the future web: a semantically-augmented web and a web of social applications where every user is an active provider as well as a consumer of information. SweetWiki makes heavy use of semantic web concepts and languages, and demonstrates how the use of such paradigms can improve navigation, search, and usability.