Semantic Wikis Expedition #52 Conor Shankey CEO July 18, 2006 Visual Knowledge, Inc. 5/25/2019

Visual Knowledge What is our technology? Large scale multi-agent software systems Agents that are rapidly modeled and evolved by different groups of people 5/25/2019

Visual Knowledge R&D through real-world implementations 5/25/2019

The original wiki idea “A web site where anybody could create/edit a web page” Structure is not pre-determined invented & evolved by community neither top down or bottom up Quick collaborative writing Non-linear Hypertext 5/25/2019

Simplicity Additional Notions Very simple markup for authors Any page can be immediately revised assuming you have the right privileges All changes are audited and transparent to the community “Concepts” in text can immediately become active resources (pages/links) Simplicity 962 000+ articles 5/25/2019

Benefits of the wiki idea Distinct concepts or topics are built on the fly Discourse forms around or in the context of a topic Eliminates serialized document work flow Team or community members can immediately see commentary in the context of a topic Consensus Agility Cohesion Speed 5/25/2019

version? Compared To… Each person edits a copy of the document A poor soul merges the results Expensive file shares E-mailing bulky documents “Versions” of opaque documents everywhere “Organizing” documents in hierarchal file system Highly structured and closed database system version? 5/25/2019

Greatest Strength and Weakness Topics or concepts lack semantics A WikiWord is just a WikiWord A page with related formatted text and WikiWords Authored, versioned content Instance based security Arbitrary structure Quick and open architecture and adoption led to lack of standardization Security? 5/25/2019

Semantic? (It’s what we do every second of the day.) Convert data into something we can comprehend By developing or applying concepts Quickly relating them to instances in the world Applying and revising our world models Sharing our models with others 5/25/2019

How do you do semantics? Generalization Aggregation Common Properties organizing concepts by kind Aggregation Aggregating complexes into simpler concepts Common Properties Relationships (connecting properties) Attributes (flat properties) Naming Conventions Terms / Phrases Language 5/25/2019

Taxonomies and Vocabularies Close One hierarchy of terms of concepts Permit only one accepted notion of a term Brother? 5/25/2019

What else do semantics provide? Contextual Meaning Inferred Relationships Causality Granularity 5/25/2019

Semantics to the rescue Phrases having different meanings in different contexts Water on mars? Food Space Exploration 5/25/2019

What can semantics bring to a wiki? Different concepts have different properties Spatial properties Unique Relationships Provide rich governance and security Some information should be presented in views to different audiences (like your social security number) For mission critical systems, staging is essential, we need separate, federated Development servers Data Staging servers QA servers Simulation servers Production servers 5/25/2019

VK Semantic Wiki Wiki concepts are just elements of an ontology Now wiki concepts have formal properties Enables semantic searching Security becomes deeply integrated into wiki Customized Wiki Views Driven by ontology Driven by library of visual templates Integrated change management Federated semantic wikis 5/25/2019

Social Network Person Details 5/25/2019

Semantic Search 5/25/2019

Ontology Management 5/25/2019

Custom View Editor 5/25/2019

VK Semantic Wiki Semantic Wikis are organized around Communities of Interest Versions of ontologies of interest drive capabilities in Wiki Protected worlds with controlled access to outside communities All contacts, concepts, layouts presented in W3C standards OWL RDF (FOAF, Dublin Core) HTML 5/25/2019

Use Case 1 Large public company with complex compliance concerns Compliance documents are pasted into Semantic Wiki Knowledge modelers develop/evolve underlying ontologies (semantic models) of organization, entitlement, responsibilities, etc.. Subject matter experts select text in wiki and convert it into semantics Ontology drives structured compliance applications Explicit Interpretation of Policy is mapped to applications 5/25/2019

Use Case 2 Spatial Ontology Working Group Spatial information is in 80% of data Diverse set of modelers from various government agencies, industry and academia Very diverse multi-disciplinary coverage Many different ontologies with overlap and different purposes Need for organized discourse around events and around concepts Need to integrate and harmonize models Need for deeply integrate change management 5/25/2019

Demo Semantic Wiki OWL Driven App cshankey@visualknowledge.com If you would like to beta, please contact cshankey@visualknowledge.com 5/25/2019