Semantic and Wiki

Just wanted to respond to Jack's post, Challenges using Semantic Wiki's for Knowledge Engineering, to clarify my intention a bit.

1. I agree that you should stick with the wiki and skip the formal relationships during the knowledge elicitation phase.
   
2. I do not expect that "a single correct and uniform world view that all stakeholders should share and will share with a little effort."
   
3. I do not want to use Semantic Wikis to create some type of process for model driven engineering.
4. I'm not interested in "mixing knowledge elicitation with design to the detriment of both."
   

What I like about semantic wikis is that they are both semantic and wiki. The wiki can be used as a tool that "captures differences, reconciles them when reasonable but not when unreasonable." I see wikipedia as a good example of this. Wikipedia's controlled vocabulary is constantly changing (I changed an entry yesterday) and is able to accommodate a wide variety of opinions and respond to the latest ideas and trends.

So what about the semantic part? I see this coming in as we move into the design phase. Why put it into the Wiki? I see this as a good way to facilitate communication between the stakeholders and system designers and expose a symbolic AI system's "mental model" of the world. Just as the various stakeholders' knowledge is captured in the wiki, I give the developing AI system it's own voice along side (rather than replacing) the human voices.

Where they all agree, you can have a single wiki entry. Where they disagree you can list all viewpoints. The semantic wiki tagging system allows you to differentiate between them, just as tagging in other forums facilitates other multi-perspective folksonomies.

What this implies, I think, is that you may be able to start with a standard Wiki and use it for quite a while and then add semantic entries on in addition to the others.