Building Semantically Enriched Glossaries On Top Of Wiki Applications

In recent years, the globalization and the need for a new socio-economicdeveloping paradigm is leading to new forms of knowledge-based economies. Thispushes forward the exploration of innovative solutions to support the extensivemanagement of enterprise knowledge in both business scenarios and in publicadministration. In this frame, the adoption of advanced Web technologies, such asSemantic Web and Linked Data, has been proven very effective in easing the re-useand exchange of knowledge. Here, the use of shared glossaries, possibly enrichedwith formal ontological definitions, constitute the backbone for new kinds ofsemantically enabled Content Management Systems.Among them, Semantic MediaWiki Plus (SMW+) is a very powerful andwidely adopted Web Content Management System (WCMS). However, SMW+hasits disadvantages. For example, the structuring of glossary term definitions is veryarbitrary, hard to use for untrained users and it is not able to capture expressivedefinitions. Therefore, the project described in this thesis aims at solving the aboveproblems by applying a state-of-the-art WCMS (in particular SMW+) anddeveloping a number of extensions that allows the users to build semanticallyenriched glossaries. We introduce forms for users to simplify and formalize theprocess of editing glossary entries, which can be applied in any domain. We alsoextend the expressivity in the description of the resources, by developing a tool toenrich the definitions of glossary entries with logical statements based on OWL,namely, realized the description about Value statements, Cardinality statements andDisjointness between categories. For users who are not familiar with such alanguage, OWL statements are also presented to the user by using a controllednatural language. In practice, this project, collaborated with SMW+, inherits all thefacilities tailored at collaborative web-based knowledge management fromMediaWiki. In addition, it also allows users to semantically annotate data withinwiki page, hence enabling semantic search and query facilities.