Mike’s Digital Laboratory

Today I gave a 10 minute presentation as a panel speaker for Part 5 of the  Semantic Wiki mini series. These  are very quick presentations and it did seem like I could say a lot in such a short time. Regardless I felt all the presentations given by the other panelists were very good and taken as a whole I feel the experience would be valuable  for anyone interested in developing semantic wikis. My slides as well as the presentations for all the other speakers are up on the  wiki page for this session.  The series of virtual events has one more session which will dovetail into the face-to-face workshop: “Social Semantic Web: Where Web 2.0 Meets Web 3.0” at the AAAI Spring Symposium, March 23-25, 2009 at Stanford, California.

“This Semantic Wiki mini-series, co-organized by FZI Karlsruhe, Mayo Clinic, Ontolog, RPI Tetherless World Constellation and Salzburg Research, Austria, represents a collaborative effort between members from academia, research, software engineering, semantic web and ontology communities. The 6-month mini-series intends to bring together developers, administrators and users of semantic wikis, and provide a platform where they can conveniently share ideas and insights. Through a series of (mainly virtual) talks, panel discussions, online discourse and even face-to-face meetings, participants will survey the state-of-the-art in semantic wiki technology and get exposure to exemplary use cases and applications. Together, they will study trends, challenges and the outlook for semantic wikis, and explore opportunities for collaboration in this very promising technology, approach or philosophy that people has labeled “semantic wiki.”

SMW+ 1.4 (a.k.a. Project Halo) has recently been released.  You can purchase the commercial version of this special edition of the Semantic MediaWiki.  Or you can download the free (open source) version from Sourceforge. I take some pride in blogging about this as I was a contributor to this release. It was really a pleasure to contribute to this project. My part was to develop the lightweight project management ontology that ships with this version.  The PM Ontology came out rather nicely i might add.  If you try it out keep in mind I designed it with the idea that others would extend it and thus customize to their own needs.  It is simple (KISS) and it provides semantic templates and forms for tasks, projects, people,organizations, events and such.  Not much more. but then that’s is just to get you started.  Once you learn how to build your own semantic templates and forms you can easily expand this ontology to suit your own organization’s needs.  Here’s a quick fact blurb about SMW+ 1.4 from the Ontoprise site.

SMW+ v1.4
It comes pre-configured and ready-to-use comprising:
- an appealing user interface to inspect, create and alter wiki articles and linked data,
- a sophisticated, yet flexible, meta data model to make project progress transparent,
- views on projects, tasks, calendars and linked documents which can be adapted by any team member using a WYSIWYG editor,
- personal home pages for team members including “friend-of-a-friend” features,
- tools for ad-hoc adaptations to the metadata model allowing to tailor SMW according to
the needs of individual team members and
- a web service connector to include data from legacy systems (i.e. bugzilla).

I was reminded of the new release toady while attending Session 4 of the ongoing Semantic Wiki mini-series.  Daniel Hansch from Ontoprise gave an overview of the new release during the lighting talks round.  Attending on-line events such as these is good way to keep pace of the development of semantic wikis.  Today’s focus was on vertical apps for semantic wiki and included presentations by Harold Solbrig and Prof. Guoqian Jiang from the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the Mayo Clinic on LexWiki and BioMedGT (see also: caBiG Knowlege base.) Another highlight today was a presentation by Jie Bao from the Department of Computer Science at RPI. Jie Bao reported on the Tetherless World project which as has delivered some very cool new applications including an interactive map of RPI and an interactive VTO Instrument Map for the the Virtual Solar Terrestrial Observatory. And  a third presention was given by Christop Lange who took us all on a whirlwind tour of semantic wikis for mathematics including his very own SWiM: A Semantic Wiki for Mathematical Knowledge Management.