Semantic WikiTraumaLink
Our intention will be to add semantic technology to support the structuring and organization of knowledge within WikiTrauma.
This semantic aspect will be called WikiTraumaLink.
Here is an example of what a semantic application developed with the Cochrane Collaboration can produce: http://m.bio2rdf.org/cochrane/. This is a mobile semantic application developed by Arnaud Droit, François Belleau and the Bio2RDF team to search for Cochrane reviews on a mobile device.
Cochrane-mobile aims to provide a generic mobile browser for semantic-web data. All the databases are hosted in multiple Virtuoso servers (http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/). The application queries an intermediate REST service to obtain the data in JSON-LD (http://json-ld.org/) standard format. The data is processed and displayed using jquery-mobile (http://jquerymobile.com/), javascript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and html5. Finally, the PhoneGap framework (http://phonegap.com/) is used to port the web application into native Android and iOS applications allowing them to be published in their respective store.
Tools that help share this knowledge across a network, and that can reason on that knowledge, will lead to users who can better use the knowledge available, i.e., to smarter users (Web 2.0). Wikipedia, a wildly successful example of web technology, has helped knowledge-sharing between people by letting individuals freely create and modify its content.
In parallel with the development of WikiTrauma, we propose to explore the potential of “semantic web” technology.
The semantic web is a set of technologies that help knowledge-sharing across the web between different applications, and is starting to gain much attention (see below Chris Mavergames presentation at the Cochrane Collaboration in Quebec City).
Researchers have only recently started working on the concept of a “semantic wiki”, mixing the advantages of the wiki and the technologies of the semantic web.
To consolidate and structure our wiki, we propose to introduce an ontology design. Our "TraumaOntology" will be a formal ontology for all trauma knowledge and structured in a Web Ontology Language (OWL).
By transforming other available resources according to the RDF semantic standard, such as drug databases, procedure catalogs and diagnostic tools we will facilitate interoperability of other Web content with the content created within WikiTrauma. From this perspective, WikiTrauma will help other users to discover information contained in its existing knowledge resources.
WikiTraumaLink, developed with state-of-the-art semantic wiki technology, will be an application reconciling two trends of the future web: a semantically augmented web of wiki documents and a web of social applications where every user is an active provider as well as a consumer of information by using a mobile application about trauma knowledge. WikiTraumaLink will make heavy use of semantic webtechnologies: ontology for knowledge representation, triplestore for linked data hosting and querying with the SPARQL language. We will demonstrates how the use of such paradigms can improve navigation, search, and usability. We have already in place, the infrastructures and the practical expertise on semantic web to develop these resources, experience gained by building the Bio2RDF semantic infrastructure.