natural | powerful | easy to use
open source semantic wiki
AceWiki is a semantic wiki that is powerful and at the same time easy to use. Making use of the controlled natural language ACE, the formal statements of the wiki are shown in a way that looks like natural English. In order to help the users to write correct ACE sentences, AceWiki provides a predictive editor. See the following resources for a first impression of AceWiki:
There are three demo wikis:
Feel free to extend and change the content. We recommend using Firefox as browser for AceWiki. Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer should work as well.
The AceWiki application and its source code are freely available as an alpha release under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. AceWiki used to be a part of the Attempto Java Packages, but is now hosted on Launchpad:
The source code, JAR files and documentation can be downloaded there. There is a README file that explains the details how to run AceWiki. In short, a servlet container like Jetty or Apache Tomcat is needed to run AceWiki. Furthermore, SWI Prolog has to be installed and you need to download and compile the latest version of the Attempto Parsing Engine (APE):
Older versions of AceWiki and APE can be found on the Attempto download page.
AceWiki has been developed by Tobias Kuhn in the Attempto group at the Department of Informatics of the University of Zurich. The first version of AceWiki was a cooperation with the Bioinformatics group of the TU Dresden.
The AceWiki interface makes use of modern AJAX technologies. It is implemented in Java using the Echo Web Framework.
The OWL reasoner Pellet is integrated into AceWiki. It ensures that the content of the wiki is always consistent. The reasoner is also used to infer the class-hierarchies and class-memberships, and the results are displayed in ACE again. Furthermore, questions can be added to the wiki articles. Those questions are evaluated by the reasoner and the answers are displayed directly in the article.
Evaluation has shown that AceWiki is easy to learn for people who are not experts in logic and ontologies. See the publications [1], [6] and [8] for the details of the user experiments.
[8] Tobias Kuhn. Controlled English for Knowledge Representation. Doctoral thesis FINAL DRAFT, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology of the University of Zurich, to appear.
[7] Juri Luca De Coi, Norbert E. Fuchs, Kaarel Kaljurand, and Tobias Kuhn. Controlled English for Reasoning on the Semantic Web. In Francois Bry and Jan Maluszynski, editors, Semantic Techniques for the Web — The REWERSE Perspective, number 5500 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 276–308. Springer, 2009.
[6] Tobias Kuhn. How Controlled English Can Improve Semantic Wikis. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Semantic Wikis, European Semantic Web Conference 2009, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2009.
[5] Tobias Kuhn. Combining Semantic Wikis and Controlled Natural Language. In Proceedings of the Poster and Demonstration Session at the 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2008.
[4] Tobias Kuhn, Rolf Schwitter. Writing Support for Controlled Natural Languages. In Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) Workshop, 2008.
[3] Norbert E. Fuchs, Kaarel Kaljurand, Tobias Kuhn. Attempto Controlled English for Knowledge Representation. In Cristina Baroglio, Piero A. Bonatti, Jan Maluszynski, Massimo Marchiori, Axel Polleres, Sebastian Schaffert (editors), Reasoning Web, Fourth International Summer School 2008, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, number 5224, pages 104–124, 2008.
[2] Tobias Kuhn. AceWiki: Collaborative Ontology Management in Controlled Natural Language. In Proceedings of the 3rd Semantic Wiki Workshop, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2008.
[1] Tobias Kuhn. AceWiki: A Natural and Expressive Semantic Wiki. In Proceedings of Semantic Web User Interaction at CHI 2008: Exploring HCI Challenges, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2008.
Please use Launchpad for questions, bug reports, comments, etc. that could be of public interest. Alternatively, you can write to the Attempto mailing list. For private messages, you can contact Tobias Kuhn directly.