SMWCon Fall 2013/An Analysis of Semantic Wiki Communities: Why Are They Embracing Properties and Not Concepts?

There are hundreds of communities that are using semantic wikis for social knowledge collection. Although wikis have been analyzed extensively, there has been little analysis of the behaviors of semantic wiki communities. We analyzed 230 installations of Semantic MediaWiki, focusing on how users edit wikis to add structure to their contents. We analyzed the concepts and properties created, the amount of editors involved in creating them, and the amount of edits for concepts and for properties. We found that concepts are not used very often, and not used at all in many wikis. Properties were used in all the wikis, although very small numbers of users edit them. Very large numbers of property assertions are made in almost every wiki. Our analysis contributes to the understanding of semantic wikis as a platform for social knowledge collection, and suggests extensions to semantic wikis that proactively prompt users to define concepts or properties, detect inconsistent definitions, and mediate their resolution. Improving the ability of all users to contribute to the semantic aspects of the wiki will enhance the use of knowledge-rich systems and broaden the adoption of semantic web technologies.

Details about these work can be found in these papers:


 * "Knowledge Capture in the Wild: A Perspective from Semantic Wiki Communities" Gil Y. and V. Ratnakar. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP), 2013.
 * "The Democratization of Semantic Properties: An Analysis of Semantic Wikis". Gil, Y.; Knight, A.; Zhang, K.; Zhang, L.; Ratnakar, V.; and Sethi, R. In Seventh IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), 2013."
 * "An Initial Analysis of Semantic Wikis" Gil, Y.; Knight, A.; Zhang, K.; Zhang, L.; and Sethi, R. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), 2013.