Semantics in Wiki - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 255

Although there are a variety of tools for automatically populating and updating
CMDBs, not all information can be determined and put in context automatically. In
order to overcome this problem, Kleiner and Abecker [ 31 ] use semantic wiki
software as the basis for creating a platform, which allows users to participate in
the documentation of configuration items and their relations to each other, as well
as best practices for the use of IT components.
The developed ITSM wiki supports a distributed, collaborative approach to
configuration management in agile environments. It is built on top of MediaWiki,
Semantic MediaWiki and SMW+, and the extension adds ITSM-specific functions
to the wiki. Kleiner and Abecker [ 31 ] have shown that it is feasible to use semantic
wikis as a platform to implement a CMDB.
10.6 Future of Semantic Wiki
The future of semantic wiki is promising. It is predicted by researchers that tech-
nologies from semantic wikis will merge into collaborative Web 2.0 (3.0?) apps like
Google Docs. There is suggestion that there will no longer be wiki text. There will be
WYSIWYG HTML editing of semantic forms. In future, there will be more expres-
sive reasoning versus consistency in semantic wiki. Semantic wiki will be the
potential for bringing the semantic Web to the masses. More and more open virtual
communities and corporate intranets will be utilising wikis using semantic wiki.
Many people have also foretold that semantic wiki will be used as a programmed
environment for applications (business, public and other domains). It will be pro-
grammed in the same way as the wiki pages are edited. Semantic wiki will be
supported by easy-to-use tools. Most semantic wiki will able to offer some data
exchange, thereby enabling knowledge exchange. Some researchers believe that
semantic wikis will become the dominant medium for human-generated informa-
tion. On the other hand, for machine- and externally generated information, seman-
tic wikis will serve as the “glue” bringing together different information sets (see, for
example, http://opencongress.org/wiki - the shape of things to come). In the future,
Semantic Wiki systems might play an important role in “knowledge acquisition”,
enabling non-technical users to contribute to the Semantic Web.
10.7 Conclusion
Wikipedia is the world's largest collaboratively edited source of encyclopaedic
knowledge. But despite its utility, its contents are barely machine interpretable.
Structural knowledge, such as the inter-relationship of concepts, can neither be
formally stated nor be automatically processed. Also, the wealth of numerical data
is available only as plain text and thus cannot be processed by using its actual
meaning. An extension has been integrated in Wikipedia that allows the typing of
links between articles and the specification of typed data inside the articles in an