A Semantic Wiki for Mathematical Knowledge Management


 * Authors: author::Christoph Lange (Universität Trier) and author::Michael Kohlhase (International University Bremen)
 * Download the [[paper URL:=http://kwarc.eecs.iu-bremen.de/projects/swim/pubs/swim-semwiki06.ps|paper]] and the poster (corrected version of June 19)!
 * [[homepage:=http://kwarc.eecs.iu-bremen.de/projects/swim/|Homepage]]

The paper will be presented at the accepted by::SemWiki2006 as a presented as::demo of the SWiM software and a presented as::poster.

Printed in the proceedeings.

Abstract
We propose the architecture of a has topic::semantic wiki for collaboratively building, editing and browsing a mathematical knowledge base. Its hyperlinked pages, containing mathematical theories, are stored in has topic::OMDoc, a markup format for mathematical knowledge representation with numerous applications: creation of customized modules for e-learning, data exchange between different theorem provers, web services, and more.

Our long-term objective is to develop a software that, on the one hand, facilitates the creation of a shared, public collection of mathematical knowledge (e.g. for education). On the other hand the software shall serve work groups of mathematicians as a tool for collaborative development of new theories.

However, to encourage users to contribute to such a system, wiki-like openness to anybody probably won't suffice. Unlike the text format used by common semantic wikis, OMDoc is inherently semantic, hence hard to write by hand, but only once enough annotated content has been created, the work pays off: the content becomes usable for high-level services like, for example, the creation of customized textbooks. If author and beneficiary of such services were different persons, though, only few persons would be willing to contribute to a knowledge base. This dilemma can be overcome when the authors themselves are rewarded for their contributions by being offered "cool" value-added services, which become the better the more annotations and cross-references the users contribute. A friendly user interface will facilitate navigation through the knowledge base along paths of semantic relations between the theories, which are computed from the OMDoc-formatted theories. Mathematicians developing theories will be assisted to retain an overview of dependent theories in order not to break existing dependencies. Social software services will further utilize the semantic information available from the theories and from tracking the user interaction log ("Who changed what on which page when?").