Semantics in Wiki - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 249

Fig. 10.5 Architecture of SMW's main components in relation to MediaWiki (from Krotzsch
et al. [ 15 ])

The primary objective for SMW, therefore, is the seamless integration of
semantic technologies into the established usage patterns of the existing MediaWiki
system. SMW is available in multiple languages.
Information is dynamic and changes in a decentralised way, and there is no
central control of the wiki's content. Decentralisation leads to heterogeneity, but
SMW ensures that existing processes of consensus finding can also be applied to the
novel semantic parts. Wikis contain not only text but also uploaded files, especially
pictures and similar multimedia content.
A semantic wiki combines the strengths of wiki technology (easy to use and
contribute, strongly interconnected, collaborative) and the Semantic Web technol-
ogies (machine processable, data integration, complex queries). Semantic wikis
have the ability to capture or identify information about the data within pages, and
the relationships between pages, in ways that can be queried or exported like
database data [ 19 ].
The primary structural mechanism of most wikis is the organisation of content
within wiki pages. In MediaWiki, these pages are further classified into name-
spaces, which distinguish different kinds of pages according to their function [ 15 ].
Semantic data in SMW is also structured by pages, such that all semantic content
explicitly belongs to a page. Semantically speaking, every page corresponds to an
ontological element (including classes and properties) that might be further
described by annotations on that very page. SMW collects semantic data by letting
users add annotations to the wiki text of pages via a special markup. The processing
of this markup is performed by the components for Parsing and Rendering in
Fig. 10.5 . Properties in SMW are used to express binary relationships between
one semantic entity (as represented by a wiki page) and some other such entity or
data value.
According to Kr otzsch et al. [ 15 ], a number of other semantic wiki implementa-

tions besides SMW have been created. These include: IkeWiki [ 16 ] and Makna-
Wiki [ 20 ]. Both of these are similar to SMW with respect to the supported kinds of

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