Enhancing Wikipedia with semantic technologies

Abstract

As the amount of content grows on the Web, there is an increasing need to provide greater search capabilities that produce relevant results. Users should be given the capability to execute complex queries in order to provide greater accuracy in their searching endeavours over the Web. The semantic Web promises to provide such a feature by making the concepts within data explicit. We examine the benefit and feasibility of implementing semantic technologies over Wikipedia, which is one of the largest repositories of knowledge at present. In our project we begin by creating a corpus of semantic data which we extract from Wikipedia. Then, we create a platform in order to cater for semantic user interface development as separate modules. Finally, we create several semantic user interface modules to test the effectiveness of such an implementation. The results from our project is that a platform to allow access to semantic data over existing content is not only possible, but an effective way to encourage development of semantic technologies. In our project, we were also able to create a way in which could leverage semantic data to allow users to perform a query based on a range of values with the guidance of a graph to visualize the distribution of results.