Collaborative Knowledge Construction

The deadline is upcoming! This weekend the deadline for submissions to the Workshop on Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge at the WWW2007 will be over. And this may be easily the hottest topic of the year, I think: how do people construct knowledge in a community?

Ontologies are meant to be shared conceptualizations -- but how many tools really allow to build ontologies in a widely shared manner?

I am especially excited about the challenge that comes along with the workshop, to examine different tools, and to see how their perform. If you have a tool that fits here, write us.

So, I know you have thought a lot about the topic of collaboratively building knowledge -- write your thoughts down! Send them to us! Come to Banff! Submit to CKC2007!

Semantic MediaWiki goes business

... but not with the developers. Harry Chen writes about it, and several places copy the press release about Centiare. Actually, we didn't even know about it, and were a bit surprised to hear that news after our trip to India (which was very exciting, by the way). But that's OK, and actually, it's pretty exciting as well. I wish Centiare all the best! Here is their press release.

They write:

Centiare's founder, Karl Nagel, genuinely feels that the world is on the verge of an enormous breakthrough in MediaWiki applications. He says, "What Microsoft Office has been for the past 15 years, MediaWiki will be for the next fifteen." And Centiare will employ the most robust extension of that software, Semantic MediaWiki.

Wow -- I'd never claim that SMW is the most robust extension of MediaWiki -- there are so many of them, and most of them have a much easier time of being robust! But the view of MediaWiki taking the place of Office -- Intriguing. Although I'd put my bets rather on stuff like Google Docs (former Writely), and add some semantic spice to it. Collaborative knowledge construction will be the next big thing. Really big I mean. Oh, speaking about that, check out this WWW workshop on collaborative knowledge construction. Deadline is February 2nd, 2007.

Click here for more information about Centiare.