Usability Meets Instant Gratification on the Semantic Web

Abstract: This paper presents a semantic wiki prototype application named SHAWN [later WikSAR] that allows structuring concepts within a wiki environment. To entice the use of Semantic Web technologies applications need to offer both high usability and instant gratification. Concept creation is exceptionally easy in SHAWN since metadata as well as plain text is entered within a single edit box on each wiki page in a self-explaining fashion. The entered data is immediately used for rendering sophisticated navigational means on the wiki. By editing simple wiki pages ontologies emerge.