Towards Scientific Collaboration in a Semantic Wiki

On the Web 2.0, there are numerous projects for collaboratively creating and using scientific knowledge in a wiki—think of the scientific sections of Wikipedia or domain-specific platforms like PlanetMath. They do, however, not yet offer semantic services that could promote collaboration both of scientific knowledge engineers and of scholars or that take semantics emerged from such communities or acquired from page contents into account. On the other hand, there are several semantic wikis—wikis enhanced with Semantic Web technologies. Current semantic wikis, however, only offer rather generic semantic services, such as semantic navigation, semantic-based editing assistance, and semantic search. Semantic services tailored to scientific knowledge and its specific structures (e. g. theories depending upon each other) are not yet provided. Based on the argument that current semantic wikis lack scientific services because domain-specific ontologies are not properly integrated, this article proposes the basic architecture of a semantic wiki centered around an ontology of scientific markup languages. Two services to be designed on top of this ontology abstraction layer are outlined, and suggestions on how to improve them by making them community-aware are discussed. 1 State of the Art and Problem Statement Current wiki projects for scientific knowledge range from comprehensive encyclopediae like Wikipedia, which covers all domains, even non-scientific ones, to projects specialised to a particular domain, such as PlanetMath, a wiki for mathematics1. As new content can quickly and easily be created and linked, wikis are also suitable for corporate knowledge management [9]—and for teams of scientists in a similar way. Neither Wikipedia nor PlanetMath offer certain services desirable for scientific communities, though. A non-semantic wiki lacks a deeper understanding of the network of links between its pages. Semantic wikis [20] address this problem by typing pages and links with terms from ontologies [14]; usually, one page describes one realworld concept (e. g. a scientific theory). Page and link types can serve as the foundation for semantic services. Two services that are desirable in a scientific ? formerly International University Bremen 1 See http://www.wikipedia.org and http://www.planetmath.org, respectively.