Collaborative Knowledge Engineering via Semantic MediaWiki

Formal modelling is a challenging and expensive task, especially for people not familiar with design techniques and formal languages. In this paper we present the modelling experience within the APOSDLE EU-project, and we describe the methodology we have developed to support an integrated modelling process of the ontologies and workflows inside APOSDLE. Our approach is based on two main pillars: (i) the usage of Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) for the collaborative development of informal, but structured, natural language descriptions of the models to be created, and (ii) a tight, and as much as possible automatic, integration of the SMW with tools for formal modelling, in order to re-use the informal descriptions for formal models creation.