Bringing the Wiki-Way to the Semantic Web with Rhizome

The Wiki and the Semantic Web can be compared as two different approaches to capturing knowledge, where the former trades away precise, explicit, and internally consistent semantics for speed and simplicity. Any attempt to bridge these two approaches has to either somehow reconcile these trades-off or make compromises one way or the other. This paper describes how Rhizome, an open source application framework for developing “Semantic Wiki” applications, attempts to bridge these approaches. Rhizome includes a text formatting language called ZML whose syntax is similar to text formatting languages found in most Wikis but with enhancement to make it easy for users to express explicit and arbitrary semantics. Rhizome relies on “shredding”, a flexible framework for specifying rules for characterizing semi-structured content with RDF and providing an ontology that can precisely describe the relationship between the source content and the resulting statements.