Overview

SemperWiki is an open-source semantic personal Wiki for Gnome. It offers the usability of personal Wikis and the improved retrieval and querying of semantic Wikis.

Personal Wikis are simple applications that allow you to collect your information in a set of related notes. The system helps you to write your thoughts down instantly, as it is always available and easy to use. Semantic Wikis consist of pages that can be annotated with semantic information. The system can then help you find and retrieve relevant information better (because it understands a bit better what each page is about).

SemperWiki combines the features of these Wiki extensions and provides a semantic personal Wiki: the power of semantics on your personal Desktop. It focuses on usability and gratification. Usability means that it is never in your way, most things happen automatically and instantly, and everything is straightforward. Gratification means that every piece of semantic information that you enter is rewarded: you see instant changes in the intelligent navigation possibilities that are computed from this semantic information. You can also query all information in the system.

Screenshots

This is the start page. You can see the text on the left hand side, the navigation on the right hand side. You can at first just use it as a normal Wiki. Just type any text and link to other pages by typing CamelCase. The sidebar on the right shows pages related to the current one; these are computed automatically all the time.

Overview

You can also see some semantic annotations (in green). These are RDF triples of the form (subject, predicate, object), stating that something (the subject) has a property (a predicate) with some value (the object). The subjects are in SemperWiki always the current page. So for example the screenshot states the following property: the page Start has dc:creator Eyal Oren; it also states that the title of the page is Start Page.

Maybe you feel dc:creator is strange, when you just want to say who wrote the page. DC here refers to the Dublin Core standard for describing bibliographical information, that people agreed on. Luckily you do not actually have to worry about that, because you can use the term browser in SemperWiki to search for an existing relevant term that you can use, and drag it into your page.

Views

The red text defines a view: a query that is executed each time the page is visited. This view shows all pages created by Eyal Oren (at the bottom). The view results are continuously up-to-date.

You can now also see the sidebar in action, the place where the semantic annotations really come to life. The sidebar automatically contains links to various related pages: other men in the system, other people, etc. These related pages are computed from the annotations: the more things you annotate, the more relations will be shown on the sidebar.

The sidebar updates itself automatically with every change you make to a page. You don't have to wait. Add to ArminHaller the statement foaf:knows EyalOren (because he knows me), and immediately the sidebar will also list other people that know me. These relations are one of the reasons to annotate pages in the first place. The more you annotate, the more the system can help you. Both with searching and with navigating.

Furthermore: you never have to save anything. Everything is saved as you type it. And everything updates as you type it.

Background

Semantic Wikis are an extension of regular Wikis, where users can add semantic annotations to Wikipages. These annotations can help users find information and navigate through the Wiki. For example, a Wiki with pages about various books could annotate these pages with little pieces of additional data, such as "this book was written by John Irving", or "This book was published in 1995". These annotations are written in RDF, although the user does not need to know any RDF. Having such semantic annotations, the system can help users who want to see all books by John Irving. It does not do a full-text search, but looks into these annotations to get very accurate and relevant results.

Personal Wikis are another extension of regular Wikis, that actually do not provide any collaborative functionality, but instead focus on providing a single user optimal usability. They have become quite popular recently, on many different platform; see for example are Tomboy, wikidPad, and VoodooPad. These personal Wikis are very simple applications and focus on some simple usability features such as instant autosave, backlinks, linking autocomplete, and full-text search.

SemperWiki combines the features of these Wiki extensions and provides a semantic personal Wiki. It focuses on usability and gratification: (i) it is very easy to use and it is never in your way; (ii) you do not have to put any semantic annotations into your page, but if you do you are instantly rewarded.

If you want to read more about the background and the possibilities of SemperWiki, please read the SemperWiki overview paper that was presented at the Semantic Desktop workshop. or the Semantic Wiki comparison paper that was presented at the SemWiki workshop.

Download

Contact

Use the mailinglist for questions, feature requests, or any other discussion. SemperWiki is developed by Eyal Oren.