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speech. Currently, all these lists have to be written manually. This introduces
several sources of inconsistency.
10.2.4 Limitations of Wikipedia
One of the main benefits of Wikipedia is the strong interconnection of its articles
via hyperlinks. The ubiquity of such links in Wikipedia is one of the key features for
finding desired information. In spite of its revolutionary editing mechanism and
organisation, Wikipedia's dedicated facilities for searching information are surpris-
ingly primitive. Users often rely on full-text search, article name or links for finding
information. So it became common to create pages with the sole purpose of collecting
links (lists of articles). A more structured approach with a similar functionality is
Wikipedia's category system [
8
].
Although Wikipedia is the biggest collaboratively created source of encyclopae-
dic knowledge, it is expanding beyond the borders of any traditional encyclopaedia.
Wikipedia is facing the problems of knowledge management. It is no longer
sufficient for today's needs. Currently, Wikipedia's contents are accessible only
for human reading. According to V
olkel et al. [
9
], current Wikipedia has no way to
automatically gather information scattered across multiple articles. They give an
example of a query such as “Give me a table of all movies from the 1960s with
Italian directors”. Although the data is quite structured (each movie on its own
article, links to actors and directors), its meaning is unclear to the computer,
because it is not represented in a machine-processable, (i.e. formalised) way.
Another drawback of Wikis is their iterative nature (sections appearing and dis-
appearing as a document evolves), which can be very difficult to track, especially
for those with slow reading speeds. Semantic Web technologies offer ways to
overcome such problems.
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10.3 Semantic Web
Tim Berners-Lee coined the term Semantic Web when envisioning the next dra-
matic evolution of Web technology. He envisions forms of intelligence and mean-
ing being added to the display and navigational context of the current World Wide
Web (Web). The Semantic Web is a long-range development that is being built in
stages by groups of researchers, developers, scientists and engineers around the
world through a process of specification and prototype instantiating these interop-
erable specifications [
10
].
“The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-
defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in co-operation.” - Tim
Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web, Scientific American,
May 2001.
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