Mike’s Digital Laboratory

A conference ontology for a semantic wiki

Although I was not able to attend the The 7th International Semantic Web Conference ISWC 2008 this year, I felt I was there in spirit. For the past several weeks I have been helping the good people at Ontoprise put together a “Wiki on a stick” to give away at the conference. If you attended you may have picked one of these up. This is very cool, it’s a USB memory stick with a semantic wiki (SMW+) on it. When you plug it in, it launches a customized version of SMW+ with all the conference events and speaker information. I had a lot of fun building the ontology for this. I still can’t get over how fast I can develop a semantically enabled wiki with these tools. If you didn’t get one don’t despair, you can see the online version as longs as it remains up.

Also, it’s not too late to enter the The Ontoprise knowledge engineering contest and win an iPod. Check it out and while you are there you can explore the rest of the SMW Forum site and learn all about SMW+.

My good Friend and Colleague Paul Wlodarczyk has started a new blog in his first post Paul wastes no time getting the semantic conversation going when he states; “Semantic markup makes your content more likely to be found and more relevant to the searcher.” for this I have to agree. So what are the answers to Paul’s questions?

* What if we start combining semantic web technologies and semantic document technologies?
* What if we combine technologies that auto-tag named entities with granular authoring approaches like DITA?
* What if you could automatically tag named entities within the DITA topic you are creating, tagging as you type?
* What if a web service could automatically provide the CMS metadata when you go to check-in a new topic?
* What if the publishing tools that transform your DITA to HTML could automatically add the semantic markup to your HTML pages that are published from your DITA content?
* How would that change how you publish business documents like policies and procedures to your employees?
* How would it change how you create marketing content for your web site?
*How would it change the way you create and manage your product technical content?

This will not be one of the those armchair quarterback blogs. Paul is well versed in both the technology and the business of online content. If online content is your interest then add this feed to your favorite RSS feed reader. you don’t want to miss an article.