E-government webs are among the largest webs in existence, based
on the size, number of users and number of information providers. Thus,
creating a Semantic Web infrastructure to meaningfully organise e-government
webs is highly desirable. At the same time, the complexity of the existing
e-government implementations also challenges the feasibility of Semantic Web
creation. We therefore propose the design of a two-layer semantic Wiki web,
which consists of a content Wiki, largely identical to the traditional web and a
semantic layer, also maintained within the Wiki, that describes semantic
relationships. This architectural design promises several advantages that enable
incremental growth, collaborative development by a large community of
non-technical users and the ability to continually grow the content layer
without the immediate overhead of parallel maintenance of the semantic layer.
This paper explains current challenges to the development of a Semantic Web,
identifies Wiki advantages, illustrates a potential solution and summarises
major directions for further research.
E-government researchers have suggested that collaborative Wiki software may be the best avenue for getting public information to the citizenry.
They advocate building two-layered Web pages, with the agency providing a base layer of information and interactive pages layered on top that domain experts, volunteers and others could use to annotate and link the data....Through a Google search, the research group found there are 368 million Web pages under the federal .gov domain alone. The authors propose using Wiki software to ease the burden of handling all this material.
Their idea is this: In addition to standard Web pages, a second interactive layer could be added to allow outside parties to add contextual information and pull together disparate strands of data....The two-layer design owes a debt to database design, the authors concede. The database itself holds the raw data, while additional indexes are placed over top to parse the data in various ways. The agencies would "rely on a community of users to maintain the semantic relationships in the form of a Wiki web," according to the paper....Communities of interest, such as domain experts from different agencies, can get together to explain the data and how it could be used.
"You really need to involve communities of interest. It takes a community to make sense out of the content," Davis said....SICoP uses the Wiki to organize meeting materials and documents, Niemann said. A Wiki was also used in developing the second draft of the Federal Enterprise Architecture's Data Reference Model. In both of those project pages, the numbers in purple are links to other static Web pages or sub-parts of the same page.
SICoP is looking at other ways and possible pilots to repurpose Wiki and other online content through the use of additional semantic layers. Niemann also points to a pilot of a medical search engine developed by SemanTx Life Sciences Inc. of Waltham, Mass. Here, you type in a question and the system "builds an ontology so you can see if that is really what you mean and then uses the ontology to structure the answers to your question," he explains.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/10/2006 09:47:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
