Reasoning in semantic wikis

Abstract

Semantic wikis combine the collaborative environment of a classical wiki with features of semantic technologies. Semantic data is used to structure information in the wiki, to improve information access by intelligent search and navigation, and to enable knowledge exchange across applications. Though semantic wikis hardly support complex semantic knowledge and inferencing, we argue that this is not due to a lack of practical use cases. We discuss various tasks for which advanced reasoning is desirable, and identify open challenges for the development of inferencing tools and formalisms. Our goal is to outline concrete options for overcoming current problems, since we believe that many problems in semantic wikis are prototypical for other Semantic Web applications as well. Throughout the paper, we refer to our semantic wiki implementations IkeWiki and Semantic MediaWiki for practical illustration. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.