A semantic wiki based on spatial hypertext

Spatial Hypertext Wiki (ShyWiki) is a wiki which represents knowledge using notes that are spatially distributed in wiki pages and have visual characteristics such as colour, size, or font type. The use of spatial and visual characteristics in wikis is important to improve human comprehension, creation and organization of knowledge. Another important capability in wikis is to allow machines to process knowledge. Wikis that formally structure knowledge for this purpose are called semantic wikis. This paper describes how ShyWiki can make use of spatial hypertext in order to be a semantic wiki. ShyWiki can represent knowledge at different levels of formality. Users of ShyWiki can annotate the content and represent semantic relations without being experts of semantic web data description languages. The spatial hypertext features make it suitable for users to represent unstructured knowledge and implicit graphic relations among concepts. In addition, semantic web and spatial hypertext features are combined to represent structured knowledge. The semantic web features of ShyWiki improve navigation and publish the wiki knowledge as RDF resources, including the implicit relations that are analyzed using a spatial parser.