WikiFactory: An ontology-based application for creating domain-oriented wikis

Abstract

Wikis play a leading role among the web publishing environments, being collaborative tools used for fast and easy writing and sharing of content. Although powerful and widely used, wikis do not support users in the aided generation of content specific for a given domain but they still require manual, time-consuming and error-prone interventions. On the other hand, semantic portals support users in browsing, searching and managing content related to a given domain, by exploiting ontologies. In this paper we propose a specific application of web ontologies, applied to the wikis: exploiting an ontological description of a domain in order to deploy a customized wiki for that specific domain. We describe the design of an ontology-based framework, named WikiFactory, that aids users to automatically generate a complex and complete wiki website related to a specific area of interest with few efforts. In order to show the applicability of our framework, we present a specific case study that describes the main WikiFactory capabilities in constructing the wiki website for a Computer Science Department in a University. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.