Re: Welcome to public-wiki-dev@w3.org, Introduction

On Donnerstag, 18. Oktober 2007, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
> So Markus,
>
> How do I set things up so I can, e.g. write a small OWL ontology on a
> wiki page, add some notes whether I expect it to be consistent or
> inconsistent, which, if any classes should be unsatisfiable, which
> instances should be checked to see whether they are classified as a
> specified type, etc.  and then write a sparql query to pull all this
> information out?

SMW uses OWL as an export format, but not for input (wikis are meant to be 
simple, and most of our users do not even know what OWL or RDF are). As of 
today, the technical and methodological issues of collaboratively editing and 
reasoning with OWL ontologies in a distributed online environment remain 
largely unsolved. It will probably take some time until reasoning with very 
expressive OWL ontologies will work in knowledge bases of Wikipedia's size 
(SMW's main target application). Maybe the tractable fragments as discussed 
in the context of OWL1.1 could improve OWL support for applications like SMW.

What SMW currently supports are ABox annotations of various datatypes, classes 
and class hierarchies, property hierarchies, some forms of equality 
reasoning, and structured queries that can be described with OWL class 
expressions. All its reasoning operations are of polynomial time complexity.

I am of course supporting the use of SMW, and enabling it certainly cannot 
hurt (at least if you use the current SMW1.0-RC1). But SMW cannot change 
MediaWiki's main usage as a tool for simple information collection. SMW can 
eliminate some redundancy in the wiki, and of course it can export some wiki 
content as OWL (which is kind of neat for an OWL WG ;). But if we also want 
an online ontology editor, some other tool would still be needed.

-- Markus

>
> We've got the semantic mediawiki extensions installed on the OWL WG
> wiki now?
>
> -Alan
>
> On Oct 17, 2007, at 2:30 PM, Markus Krötzsch wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am a member of the RIF and OWL working groups. My relationship
> > with wikis
> > mainly stems from my activity as the main developer/maintainer of the
> > Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) extension [1] for getting metadata into
> > and out of
> > MediaWiki, and at least formally I am also a MediaWiki developer (I
> > can
> > commit to the MW trunk). We have been using a lot of wikis in
> > Karlsruhe for
> > quite some time now, both for our group intranet and for several
> > community
> > sites (now mainly ontoworld.org, which is also the wiki used for
> > all recent
> > semantic web conferences [E|I|A]SWC). I am also experimenting
> > semantic wikis
> > for non-collaborative website management, e.g. on my homepage [2] (all
> > publication lists are generated by semantic queries, all data is
> > available in
> > OWL/RDF).
> >
> > Re migration: we have once migrated from SnipSnap to MediaWiki, and
> > worked
> > with categories to "tag" imported pages for manual cleanup.
> >
> > -- Markus
> >
> > [1] http://ontoworld.org/wiki/SMW
> > [2] http://korrekt.org
> >
> > On Mittwoch, 17. Oktober 2007, Sandro Hawke wrote:
> >> I've just asked for this new mailing list to be created and took the
> >> liberty of subscribing you.
> >>
> >> The stated purpose of this list:
> >>
> >>      This list is for talking about the development (installation,
> >>      configuration, customization, and extension) of wikis at W3C for
> >>      W3C groups, including wiki-related tools. Administrative
> >> requests
> >>      (eg for a new wiki) and such should still go to sysreq@w3.org.
> >>
> >>          -- http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-wiki-dev/
> >>
> >> Perhaps we can each say a few words about who we are and what we
> >> have in
> >> mind here....
> >>
> >> I'll start:
> >>
> >> I'm the staff contact for the RIF and OWL Working Groups.  RIF's been
> >> using MoinMoin heavily for two years now [1], including generating
> >> its
> >> TRs out of the wiki, using wiki-tr [2], which I wrote.  OWL has just
> >> started, and plans to do the same, but since it's new it was able to
> >> just use MediaWiki [3].   With Alan Ruttenberg's help I think the
> >> setup
> >> is pretty good.   See the scribe-output in the wiki [4], although
> >> that
> >> process is not fully automated at this point.
> >>
> >> I got involved with Wikis as we were installing MoinMoin, back in
> >> 2003,
> >> and did a lot of work with it for a few months before I lost interest
> >> [5].  I'm currently pretty excited about MediaWiki.
> >>
> >>        -- Sandro
> >>
> >> [1] http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/wiki/TitleIndex
> >> [2] http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/wiki/UCR
> >> [3] http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Special:Allpages
> >> [4] http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Teleconference.2007.10.10/Minutes
> >> [5] http://esw.w3.org/topic/MoinMoinToDo?action=info
> >
> > --
> > Markus Krötzsch
> > Institut AIFB, Universät Karlsruhe (TH), 76128 Karlsruhe
> > phone +49 (0)721 608 7362        fax +49 (0)721 608 5998
> > mak@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de        www  http://korrekt.org



-- 
Markus Krötzsch
Institut AIFB, Universät Karlsruhe (TH), 76128 Karlsruhe
phone +49 (0)721 608 7362        fax +49 (0)721 608 5998
mak@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de        www  http://korrekt.org