SMWCon Fall 2013/OWL Wiki Forms (OWF): A Style Language that Generates Wikis from Semantic Web Ontologies

We describe OWL Wiki Forms (OWF), a Semantic MediaWiki extensions that maps any Semantic Web ontologies to a Semantic Forms-based semantic wiki. This enables quick start-up of semantic wikis for given knowledge domains. OWF's initial input is a list of URIs for online files containing Semantic Web ontologies, which are structural models for data on the Semantic Web. The resulting wikis export data entered in their forms-based interface in the semantic Web format RDF. This RDF export conforms to the input ontologies by using their URIs.

OWF builds upon Semantic MediaWiki and Semantic Forms. It provides a special page on which the user enters URI's to Semantic Web ontology files online. OWF then analyses the structure of these ontologies to automatically generate new pages with which end users can annotate and then browse data conforming to these ontologies. The types of pages it generates are category, template, property and form pages, relying primarily on Semantic Forms. Any subsequent RDF export from the wiki, including via a SPARQL endpoint for the wiki, uses the URI's of the input ontologies.

To tailor beyond this domain-specific default interface, OWF takes a layer style specification approach similar to that of CSS. We implement this layering in the Semantic Web style format Fresnel, which defines browsing interfaces to Semantic Web data. OWF's implementation of Fresnel is comparable to Page Schemas. Both Fresnel and Page Schemas provide declarative definitions in standardized syntaxes of Semantic Forms interfaces for given data models. While Page Schemas uses XML to define Semantic Forms interfaces directly, Fresnel uses RDF to define general semantic browser interfaces, from which OWF generates Semantic Forms code.

OWF extends these two approaches with default and layered style sheets for Fresnel. Our technique automatically generates from any given ontologies Fresnel code that defines a default target interface for data using those ontologies, similar to Page Schemas' generation of interface specifications from database schemas. Hand-written Fresnel code can then cascade over this default interface style to let the user fine-tune it, similar to the layered approach in CSS. Our approach processes the source ontologies and the default and fine-tuning Fresnel to generate an assistive browse-and-annotate wiki interface. The result is the quick initialization and facilitated maintenance of distributed and accessible interfaces for collaborative input of data on the Semantic Web.