From SMW+ Semantic Enterprise Wiki
Why are you claiming SMW+ is a "semantic enterprise wiki"?
A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content quickly. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites.[1] The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known and most widely used wikis. The underlying wiki engine of Wikipedia - called MediaWiki[2] - is also contained in SMW+ and serves as technical framework.
Wikis are a special type of Content Management Systems (CMS)[3] taking a different approach to content management by preferring speed and flexibility rather than strict publication controls. This wiki principle[4] says, that basically anyone can publish wiki articles and change articles from other users and, due to often collaborative edits, the wiki community achieves a consensus on wiki articles. As a side effect, the principle is fostering "bottom-up" interaction and information exchange, and complements the centrally organized "top-down" activities, which results in formal deliverables.
Enterprises are adopting wikis more and more over the last years to make use of the wiki principle to achieve business aims[5]. Possible application purposes range from the usage as enterprise wikipedia, creating sales proposals and policies, planing marketing activities and competitive analysis to the developing of new products. Figure 1 displays some of the most common usage scenarios of enterprise wikis.
Employing a wiki in a corporate environment poses special requirements on the wiki-software such as:
- Reliability in daily operation: the wiki software must be mature, fault tolerant and failover safe.
- Ease of procurement: a professional vendor maintains and issues the software in stable release cycles.
- Commercial support contracts: professional vendors must provide for software maintenance- and support contracts.
- Minimal training efforts: the wiki must be designed to enable a slow learning curve allowing casual users to apply it efficiently in daily work.
- Access control: the wiki software must provide a fine grained, yet easy to configure, access control to restrict access to confidential or protected wiki contents.
- Scalability: the wiki software shall grow with the demands of the corporation with regard to feature richness, stored data and number of end-users.
- Interoperability: the wiki software must embed seamlessly into a corporation's IT strategy and allow exchanging data with existing third party applications.
Compared with other enterprise wikis SMW+ ranks under the top three with the other two being Atlassian's Confluence and Mindtouch's DekiWiki (click here to study the complete comparison). The aforementioned wikis claim to leverage acquisition and availability of corporate knowledge by entering text and media. In reality they are just collections of socially generated articles where users can easily get lost.
SMW+ is a semantic wiki allowing casual users to include structured data (such as milestone dates and sales figures) into articles by using special markups and, thus, organize articles in a graspable manner and to instantaneously exploit the data. The knowledge in your wiki is no longer locked up in unstructured content, but is made explicit for human readers and machines. Therefore SMW+ is a full blown knowledge management system combining a wiki's social authoring approach with proven semantic technology.[6]
Basically, semantic wikis (such as SMW+ and Semantic MediaWiki) introduce some additional markup into the wiki-text which allows users to add "semantic annotations" to wiki contents. This provides richer means for structuring wiki data, helps users to find more information in less time, and improves the overall quality and consistency of the wiki. Figure 2 shows one way in SMW+ to include semantically annotated data into wiki articles.
The extent to which knowledge can be entered explicitly into a wiki is called expressivity. A comparison between SMW+ and most progressed semantic wikis reveals that SMW+ provides highest expressivity (click here to study the complete comparison).
The ability to enter and exploit semantically annotated data sitting in wiki-articles offers the following benefits for you:
- Better organization of wiki articles: users will not get lost in a flat collection of articles. Instead they can organize them in multiple, user-centric hierarchies which are kept up-to-date automatically, e.g. a dynamic table of contents of articles for beginners.
- Automatically updated lists: a simple, yet powerful, query language allows building lists of articles which are kept up-to-date automatically, e.g. "customers with more than $10.000 sales revenue a month".
- Preserving the context of data: annotations of data directly in articles preserves the origin of data; e.g. if the date of a milestone is annotated directly in the project contract then no questions will arise who has approved the date.
- Feeding knowledge into third party applications: selected data sitting in wiki-articles can be easily imported from within Microsoft Excel and subjected to complex analysis; e.g. calculate the best allocation of resources for a project by exploiting status and workload data documented in the wiki.
- Knowledge consolidation and unified view: data from external applications (e.g. BI or bug tracking systems) can be easily attached (and kept updated) to working documents in the wiki, thus, allowing to gain a consolidated overview of complex circumstances, e.g. combining all change requests of a project stakeholder with technical assessments from the team to prepare a claim.
SMW+ combines a wiki's collaborative authoring approach with proven semantic technology, yielding a powerful semantic enterprise wiki that gives instant reward for teams and organizations employing it.
