Wiki and Semantics: Panacea, Contradiction in Terms, Pressure for Innovation? Some experiments and tracks towards Intelligence Amplifiers

Abstract. This paper examines the relative characteristics of wiki principles and of semantic systems. It first stresses some oppositions between these two approaches, and exposes the challenge of their reconciliation. We then make a detailed description of Ideliance, a ” pure “ semantic tool, and we set criteria to compare several existing semantic wiki systems. After a critical look at some of their features, we propose precise directions for cross-fertilisation of semantics and wikis, advocating for solid, long-term foundations. 1 Semantic Wiki: an oxymoron which raises many questions We must first realise that the existence of the Semantic Wiki “ concept, comes — like many other Information Systems concepts — from our inability to build machines or programs which automatically understand natural language, either in the form of documents or in the form of spoken or written conversations (as quoted in [1], best analysis programs fail to understand a sentence in mor