Abstract:

Apart from learning platforms, wiki platforms allow teaching staff to organize educational materials in an attractive and non-traditional way, but still very well structured. Moreover, adding semantics to the content manager improves query results, therefore a twofold advantage: for teachers to easily manage the learning objects and for students to retrieve information. This paper presents a semantic wiki for students in Nuclear Power Engineering and Technologies, and in Environmental Engineering, presenting fundamental concepts useful across several curriculum subjects.

The methodology used for developing the wiki consisted of the following steps:
(i) select the reference terms necessary for our students;
(ii) create a glossary;
(iii) make a typical form for defining a reference term;
(iv) fill in the form for a representative set of terms;
(v) select the wiki platform for the implementation;
(vi) represent the ontology containing reference terms and relationships between them;
(vii) install the wiki and configure the teachers’ user accounts;
(viii) create wiki pages correspondent to the reference terms within the ontology ;
(ix) define types of semantic links and apply them for the existing web pages;
(x) perform navigation tests with students as non-registered users.

A form for characterizing a reference term contains: Name, Definition, Description, Figure, Figure Title, Bibliography, Connected Concepts and Category. Currently, there are two main categories: Terminology - including terms about radiations, environment monitoring and security - and Nuclear Watch - with terms about natural hazard evaluation, emergency situation management, organization framework and hazard management systems. Apart from the simple links introduced for Connected Concepts and Category, we introduced new tokens in the Semantic Links module from Tiki Wiki, like „is part of” and „contains”, which are mutually inverted. For example, the token „is part of” was used to create links between some of the web pages correspondent to the reference terms. Thus, from the web page for the „Data Processing” term it is possible to navigate towards the types of systems where it belongs, i.e. to the web pages for „Alert System” and „Early Warning System”. Similarly, the token „contains” is used to indicate that the components of an „Early Warning System” are: „Hazard Monitoring”, „Data Processing”, „Emergency Situations Support”, „Decision Support”, and „Data Visualization”.

Before the implementation, we made a comparison between Semantic MediaWiki and the solution offered within the Tiki platform. We especially appreciated the former for the semantic capabilities and for the possibility to import an ontology represented in a standard format like OWL (Web Ontology Language). However, we were confronted to several difficulties concerning user management, modification of the website look, necessity of manual configuration, extending existing modules, maintenance and evolution. Instead, Tiki Wiki was more friendly from the developer’s and administrator’s points of view. We decided to implement the specific ontology with the Semantic Links module of Tiki Wiki, instead of using Sesame, Jena or Arc 2 for interpreting RDF files and accessing an external ontology with the SparQL language.

Keywords:

Semantic wiki, power and environmental engineering, hazard management.