Towards Wikis as semantic hypermedia

Abstract

Similarly to the Web Wikis have advanced from initially simple ad-hoc solutions to highly popular systems of widespread use. This evolution is reflected by the impressive number of Wiki engines available and by the numerous settings and disciplines they have found applicability to in the last decade. In conjunction to these rapid advances the question on the fundamental principles underlying the design and the architecture of Wiki technologies becomes inevitable for their systematic further development and their long-lasting success at public, private and corporate level. This paper aims at be part of this endeavor; building upon the natural relationship between Wikis and hypermedia, we examine to which extent the current state of the art in the field (complemented by results achieved in adjacent communities such as the World Wide Web and the Semantic Web) fulfills the requirements of modern hypermedia systems. As a conclusion of the study we outline further directions of research and development which are expected to contribute to the realization of this vision.

Effect of the usage of wikis on an educational context

“…Later on the wiki engines introduced features to allow a direct visualization of images contents (JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc.) [4,5].…”

A study of ontology convergence in a semantic Wiki

“…A Semantic wiki is a system that allows collaborative authoring, editing and linking of pages, but also authoring and adding semantics to the data on the wiki itself. Figure 1, proposed by Tolksdorf and Simperl [29], positions Semantic wikis as a solution for both creating and managing pages but also allowing knowledge representation.…”

User defined structural searches in mediawiki

“…Others have worked on making the wiki semantic, including Buffa [1] and Tolksdorf [7]. The focus is in all cases to add semantic information to wikis, which can later be used.…”