Alexandre Passant1,2, Philippe Laublet1

1 LaLIC, Université Paris-Sorbonne2 EDF, Recherche & Développement

Towards an Interlinked Semantic Wiki FarmSemWiki2008 - ESWCJune 2, 2008

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Social software at EDF R&D

• Electricité de France R&D• The largest electricity company in France• More than 2000 researchers in its R&D department• Lots of different people: chemists, trading experts, computer

scientists ...• Informal and closed-world communities

• “Knowledge = Power”, due to its cultural history

• Enterprise 2.0 and EDF R&D• Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms

within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”, Andrew McAfee, May 2006

• Find ways to let people more easily exchange information and build knowledge collaboratively

• Introducing new tools and principles• Blogs, RSS feeds, tagging, wikis• Top-down vs bottom-up approach

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Using Wikis at EDF R&D

• Users adopted wikis for their particular needs, as people do on the Web

• Internal project management• Corporate information• Knowledge bases on scientific topics• ...

• Usage statistics• More than 1000 registered users for the whole platform• About 50 wikis, 2800 pages, 60 active users• Different wikis as some people want “their” wiki• Closed, read-only and open wikis, depending on the communities• 10% radio between consumers and producers (blogs included)• Many people were not used to those Web 2.0 principles

• Both technically and regarding the cultural changes it implies regarding knowledge management

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Technical limits of wikis for knowledge management

• Wikis search-engines can only answer plain-text queries• Natural Language Processing algorithms must be applied to extract

information from current wiki systems• Cannot answer questions about the content of wiki pages

• “Is EDF located in France ?”• “List all companies known in that wiki”• “Who’s working on tidal energies ?”

• Wikis manage documents, not machine-readable representations of real-world objects

• Documents and hyperlinks instead of resources, relationships and properties

• A gap between these two ways of modeling knowledge• The Semantic Web bridges this gap and semantic wikis provide

ways to achieve this

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From documents to resources

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Existing semantic wikis

• Using wikis to model data using Semanitic Web principles• Ontology population and instances evolution• Adding RDF into wiki pages

• SemperWiki• Extending wiki syntax to define annotations

• Semantic MediaWiki• Assisting users with user-friendly interfaces

• IkeWiki, OntoWiki

• Using Semantic Web principles to enrich the usage of wikis• Organizing tags to enhance information retrieval

• SweetWiki

• Powerful (querying, reasoning, enhanced navigation ...), but raise usability issues in a corporate context

• URIs, namespaces, triples...• People need something that work without aditional efforts

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UfoWiki: Unifying Forms and Ontologies in a Wiki

• A semantic wiki-farm server• Goals

• Provide a user-friendly interface to let users create ontology instances and manage them in the wiki way

• Hidden semantics for end-users, using forms• Use SIOC and MOAT to model wiki pages meta-data, so that it can

be integrated with other internal SIOC data• A corporate SIOC-o-sphere

• Connect the meta-data layer to the data (i.e. content) layer• Who wrote facts about EDF ?

• Reuse RDF data available on the Web• Geonames.org, DBpedia ...

• Interlink data from various wiki instances• While some wikis are private, their data is valuable

• Re-use semantic annotations to provide value added interfaces• Macros, semantic search-engine

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A form-based user interface

• Using forms to maintain ontology instances• Let end-users focus on the content rather than on the modeling• Avoid semantic heterogeneity

• Wiki administrators define form-based page templates• Based on existing Drupal modules

• Flexinode (Drupal4), rewriting to CCK• Each page corresponds to an ontology class

• Organization page => foaf:Organization• Each field corresponds to a property or relationship

• Some complex fields can be used to define internal instances• Some fields can be used to define MOAT tags

• Ease the process of linking tagged content to related instances• E.g. acronym, nickname

• SPARQL autocompletion based on expected class type• Closing the open-world assumption, inference might come later

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Using wiki to manage ontology instances

• Each created page yields to one main instance, and related / internal ones

Macro interne

Champ avec auto-complétion

Instance interne

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Linking data and meta-data

• embedsKnowledge: linking a sioc:Item to a graph containing the triples that were create from this sioc:Item

• Using SIOC Types module for meta-data modeling• sioct:WikiArticle rdfs:subClassOf sioc:Item

athena:EDF

http://sws.geonames.org/3017382geonames:locatedIn

Wiki page A

embedsKnowledge

sioct:WikiArticle

rdf:type

sioc:has_creator

http:://athena/alex

dc:title

EDF

Meta-data RDF file

Data RDF file

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Architecture of a single wiki

Semantic Web layer

Document layer(wiki level)

Wiki page

A

RDF

description

of objects

embedded

in page A

RDF

meta-data

about page

A

Wiki page

B

RDF

description

of objects

embedded

in page B

RDF

meta-data

about page

B

HTML hyperlink

produces

producesproduces produces

Semanticrelationships

between objects

semantic linksemantic link

User 1

User 2

RDF Store

edit

edit

Storage

Meta-data ontologies

(SIOC, DC ...)

Data-modelingontologies

(SKOS, Domain ontologies ...)

uses

uses

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Interlinking data from various wikis

• All wikis share a common knowledge base• URI identification across wikis• Merge statements about URIs but keep source using named graphs

athena:EDF

http://sws.geonames.org/3017382

geonames:locatedIn

Wiki page A

embedsKnowledge

athena:EDF

athena:NuclearEnergy

athena:produces

Wiki page B

embedsKnowledge

RDF Backend

sioct:WikiArticle

sioct:WikiArticle

rdf:type

rdf:type

athena:EDFgeonames:locatedIn

http://sws.geonames.org/3017382 athena:NuclearEnergy

athena:produces

stores stores

merges

Wiki A

Wiki B

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Using produced RDF data

• RDF data is exported to the triple-store when page is created• Immediately re-usable and up-to-date data

• Inline macros• Defined by wiki administrators, using PHP and SPARQL• User-friendly syntax to let end-users embed it in wiki pages

• Eg: [onto|members], [onto|type,foaf:Person]• Can be used to run complex queries about data from another wiki

• Eg: All activities of an company and related organizations

• Direct RDF querying• Advanced users - User-friendly SPARQL interface planned• Queries regarding data, meta-data or both

• Semantic search• From keyword to concept• Integration with other SIOC data

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Macro results

• SPARQL query results in wiki pages• Subject of the query is the currently browsed instance• Similar to SemanticMediaWiki inline macros• Semantic back-links

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SPARQL-ing RDF data from the wiki

• Combining meta-data and content levels:• All pages from the wiki #6 that provide information about EDF and

than have at least 2 repliesselect ?page ?title

where {

graph ?data {

:EDF ?predicate ?object

} .

?page :embedsKnowledge ?data ;

rdf:type sioct:WikiArticle ;

dc:title ?title ;

sioc:has_container <http://example.org/wiki/6> ;

sioc:num_replies ?replies .

<http://example.org/wiki/6> a sioct:Wiki .

} FILTER (?replies > 1)

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Reusing RDF data available on the Web

• The Linking Open Data initiative• Lots or RDF data available from reference data-sets• GeoNames, DBpedia, riese …

• Using the same ontologies in a corporate environment• Low-cost integration• No need to align vocabularies and define mapping between them

• GeoNames wrapper• “city, (state), country” fields mapped to geonames.org web-service• Retrieve the location URI and its related RDF file (with coordinates)• Simple way to create geolocation services and enhance navigation• Provide interlinked RDF data

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Easy-geolocation with our GeoNames wrapper

• Combining geolocation and macro-queries• Location of any member of the currently browsed organization

• [onto|mapmembers] => SPARQL + rendering

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Querying the internal SIOC-o-sphere

• Combining SIOC-based information from various data sources • Find relevant resource from given keyword with MOAT• Retrieves main / related wiki pages from different wikis• Retrieve “tagged” blog posts

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Conclusion

• Overview of our approach• User-friendly interface with forms mapped to ontologies• SIOC-based meta-data to ease integration with existing SIOC data• Combining meta-data and data (content) layer• Interlinking data from various wiki instances• Using existing RDF data and vocabularies for value-added service

• What’s next ?• Validate forms using the underlying ontologies• User-interface to define macros• Linking / reusing more LOD data• Use SIOC in other wikis as a meta-data model

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Thank you !Any questions ?slides @ http://apassant.net