Kyoto

The Kyoto project is made possible by a donation of the European Union.

Wolf

Tibet

Wikyplanet is the wiki-platform that has been developed for the European project (ICT 211423) KYOTO (Knowledge Yielding Ontologies for Transition-based Organization).

The 1st KYOTO Workshop in the Artis Zoo, Amsterdam on 2-3 February 2009 provided the basis for developing Wikyplanet. The workshop provided a forum for the environment (user) community to meet the language technology community; during the presentations and interactive sessions a number of issues emerged including the "technology gap" currently suffered by the environment community. When compared to other knowledge based sectors (e.g. bio-technology and medicine), the environment community is apparently using very little information technology in general and, where it does, makes use of the basic technology in a non-optimal way.

Another major conclusion was that in order to improve the sharing and exchange of knowledge, data and information the users have a very urgent need to organize themselves as an Internet community, preferably through a community platform. Such a platform can immediately help to:

• create global social networks of specialists of different expertise;
• share knowledge and information in a more efficient way;
• standardize knowledge and information;
• add trust values to specialists in the community and to the information that is provided;

Semantic Media Wiki

Wikyplanet is built with so-called Semantic MediaWiki software. Semantic MediaWiki is an extension of MediaWiki (a widely used wiki-engine that also powers Wikipedia).

Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is a semantically enhanced wiki engine that enables users to annotate the wiki’s contents with explicit, machine-readable information. Using this semantic data, SMW addresses core problems of today’s wikis:

• Consistency of content: The same information often occurs on many pages. How can one ensure that information in different parts of the system is consistent, especially as it can be changed in a distributed way?
• Accessing knowledge: Large wikis have thousands of pages. Finding and comparing information from different pages is a challenging and time-consuming task.
• Reusing knowledge: Many wikis are driven by the wish to make information accessible to many people. But the rigid, text-based content of classical wikis can only be used by reading pages in a browser or similar application.

WikyPlanet is being developed by ECNC and Wereldnatuurfonds