DSMW: Distributed Semantic MediaWiki

DSMW is an extension to Semantic Mediawiki (SMW), it allows to create a network of SMW servers that share common semantic wiki pages. DSMW users can create communication channels between servers and use a publish-subscribe approach to manage the change propagation. DSMW synchronizes concurrent updates of shared semantic pages to ensure their consistency. It offers new collaboration modes to semantic wiki users and supports dataflow-oriented processes. 1 Research Background: Collaborative Editing Semantic wikis allow to create and edit collaboratively semantically annotated documents. However, compared with other collaborative systems, semantic wikis do not support offline work or multi-synchronous editing [1]. In existing semantic wikis, every change in a page is immediately visible for both end users and semantic engines. However, in many cases it is necessary to change multiple pages before to make them visible. Existing semantic wikis cannot prevent users to access, navigate or query inconsistent pages. Moreover, the lack of multi-synchronous support prevents users to work isolated [2] and also prevents semantic wikis to support dataflow oriented processes. To overcome these limitations, we propose a distributed approach for semantic wikis. In this approach, semantic wiki pages are replicated over a network of interconnected semantic wiki servers. Changes issued on one server are local but can be published to other servers. Remote servers can subscribe to these changes, pull them and integrate them to their local pages. Changes propagation remains under the control of the users. Concurrent changes on a page issued by different servers are handled by a merge procedure. Using this approach, users can alternate between isolated periods of work and synchronization sequences with remote servers. They can introduce changes to multiple pages before to atomically render these changes public. They can choose when to incorporate, or not, remote changes. In addition, the approach can be the basis for implementing processes in which flows of semantic wiki pages can traverse a network of semantic wiki servers. Each wiki server can implement one or several steps of a particular process for the creation and maintenance of semantic pages.