Semantic MediaWiki in Operation: Experiences with Building a Semantic Portal

Wikis allow users to collaboratively create and maintain content. Semantic wikis, which provide the additional means to annotate the content semantically and thereby allow to structure it, experience an enormous increase in popularity, because structured data is more usable and thus more valuable than unstructured data. As an illustration of leveraging the advantages of semantic wikis for semantic portals, we report on the experience with building the AIFB portal based on Semantic MediaWiki. We discuss the design, in particular how free, wiki-style semantic annotations and guided input along a predefined schema can be combined to create a flexible, extensible, and structured knowledge representation. How this structured data evolved over time and its flexibility regarding changes are subsequently discussed and illustrated by statistics based on actual operational data of the portal. Further, the features exploiting the structured data and the benefits they provide are presented. Since all benefits have its costs, we conducted a performance study of the Semantic MediaWiki and compare it to MediaWiki, the nonsemantic base platform. Finally we show how existing caching techniques can be applied to increase the performance.