Good news for the Semantic Web
The World Wide Web is constantly evolving, and researchers are striving for ways to promote common data standards, such as through open-source collaboration software. One way of achieving this objective is through the Semantic Web concept, which allows data to be shared and reused across applications, organisations and communities. Semantic collaboration software enables different parties to contribute information to any web space and add value to information systems, representing a strong trend in the Internet of the future. Three important fields that can benefit from semantic collaboration online are management, education and tourism. The EU-funded project 'Semantic collaboration for enterprise knowledge management, e-learning and e-tourism' (ONTOWIKI) took up this challenge. The project worked on a tool called Ontowiki that facilitates the visual presentation of a knowledge base as an information map, enabling intuitive authoring of semantic content. This open-source software and web application foster a collaborative spirit where people can add semantic representations based on resource description framework web specifications. The software's main feature is that it tracks changes and instigates discussion on every part of a knowledge base, measuring content popularity and acknowledging user efforts. In effect, Ontowiki improves browsing and data retrieval through semantic enhanced search strategies. It has been designed to lower barriers for launching new web-based projects and for encouraging domain experts to work together using semantic technologies. In this spirit, the project team strove to advance Ontowiki as a platform in order to create and manage semantic e-learning and e-tourism content. An important achievement in this respect involved extending and integrating software products of the project's small business partners with Ontowiki and releasing related software components as open-source to the public. The project's results have been published in over 30 scientific publications and journals, in addition to being disseminated through international conferences, blogs, videos and presentations. In this way, ONTOWIKI has contributed significantly to web semantics and to overall progress on the web.
