The Collaborative Knowledge Construction (CKC) Challenge

The CKC Challenge Highlights A New Generation of Semantic Web Tools

Many predict — and I concur — collaborative methods to add rigor and structure to tagging and other Web 2.0 techniques will be one of the next growth areas for the semantic Web. Under the leadership of the University of Southampton, Stanford University and the University of Karlsruhe, the Collaborative Knowledge Construction (CKC) Challenge has been designed to seek use and feedback on this new generation of semantic Web collaboration tools.

Anyone is welcomed to register and participate during the challenge test period of April 16 – 30, with recognition to the most active and most insightful testers. The candidate tools are:

• BibSonomy — is a Web-based social resource sharing system that allows users to organize and share bookmarks and publications collaboratively
• Collaborative Protégé — is an extension of the existing Protégé system that supports collaborative ontology editing of components and annotations
• DBin — is a general purpose application that enables domain experts to create “discussion groups” in which communities can annotate any subject of interest via RDF
• Hozo — is an ontology visualization and development tool that brings version control constructs to group ontology development
• OntoWiki — is a semantic collaboration platform implementing Web 2.0 approaches for the collaborative development of knowledge bases
• SOBOLEO — is a system for Web-based collaboration to create SKOS taxonomies and ontologies and to annotate various Web resources using them.

Some of these tools are quite new and some I need to add to my Sweet Tools listing. The CKC Challenge Web site has nice write-ups, screen shots, and further information on these tools.

Results from the challenge will be discussed at the broader Workshop on Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge at the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007) in Banff, Canada, on May 8, 2007. As part of the general program, Jamie Taylor of Metaweb will also give an invited talk.

CKC Challenge participants do not need to attend in Banff to be eligible for recognition; all results and feedback will be made public by the Challenge organizers.