Semantic Wikis: Conclusions from Real-World Projects With Ylvi

Wikis have proven to be a useful tool for knowledge creation, sharing, and archival in a number of application fields. Their unstructured, flat nature makes them an easy-to-use tool for many purposes, while simultaneously imposing a significant problem: especially when wikis grow in size, content becomes hard to find and navigate. Semantic wikis enrich traditional wikis with semantic annotations like categories, attributes, and typed relationships. Although a number of promising research prototypes have been developed, little has been reported on how semantically enabled wikis are used in production environments. In this paper we describe relevant aspects of our semantic wiki implementation Ylvi and present a first analysis of scenarios in which a semantic wiki has been successfully used in the real world. We describe three different applications in the areas of education, project management and content management and identify experiences, lessons learned, and future directions for research on semantic wikis.