Semantic
Technologies for Collaboration |
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With distributed information systems and the Internet continually increasing in significance, collaboratively creating and managing information has become an essential requirement for the success of virtual organizations. This situation has led to a plethora of platforms supporting cooperation as well as joint information access among geographically dispersed user communities that have emerged in the last decades: collaborative information spaces, telecooperation, autonomous agents or, more recently, various Web-related forms of communication and cooperation such as discussion forums, community portals, Wikis and blogs. A fundamental requirement for an effective collaboration is the availability of technologies and tools which provide an explicit and unambiguous representation of the shared information and a feasible management of such semantics-enhanced information repositories. The emergence of the Semantic Web has marked an important stage in the evolution of semantic technologies. In this context the knowledge components i.e. ontologies are formalized using Web-suitable, but in the same time semantically unambiguous representation languages, are accessible and can be shared and reused across the World Wide Web. The Semantic Web offers new opportunities for the next generation of collaborative applications: it provides us with novel means to classify information items i.e. by means of ontologies which formally represent the consensual understanding of the application users w.r.t. a particular domain of interest. Taking advantage of this technology, the first promising implementations of Semantic Web-based collaboration platforms such as Semantic Web portals, semantic Wikis and blogs, to name only a few, have been proposed. This site collects our
recent research on
Semantic Technologies for Collaboration. Of interest to us are methodologies for
collaboratively creating and managing shared
information, collaborative
ontology engineering, semantic
collaboration applications, collaborative
Semantic Web portals, semantic
community
support systems, semantic
Wikis, Semantic Blogging,
Semantic Mindmapping
and Conceptmapping, case
studies, lessons
learned and experience reports on
semantics-aware collaborative applications and studies on the value
added to
collaboration by semantic technologies. ActivitiesResults
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