Ontologies-based Architecture for Sociocultural Knowledge Co-Construction Systems
This work addresses a technical bottleneck for developers and users of semantic wikis, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing OfW and WfO approaches without introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the mismatch between relational databases and semantic data in semantic wiki platforms by proposing an ontology-based architecture that uses RDF for more natural storage, aiming to improve data management and querying in systems like Semantic MediaWiki.
Considering the evolution of the semantic wiki engine based platforms, two main approaches could be distinguished: Ontologies for Wikis (OfW) and Wikis for Ontologies (WfO). OfW vision requires existing ontologies to be imported. Most of them use the RDF-based (Resource Description Framework) systems in conjunction with the standard SQL (Structured Query Language) database to manage and query semantic data. But, relational database is not an ideal type of storage for semantic data. A more natural data model for SMW (Semantic MediaWiki) is RDF, a data format that organizes information in graphs rather than in fixed database tables. This paper presents an ontology based architecture, which aims to implement this idea. The architecture mainly includes three layered functional architectures: Web User Interface Layer, Semantic Layer and Persistence Layer.