About SMW+

What is SMW+?
SMW+ is a semantic enterprise wiki that is distributed by Ontoprise GmbH, Karlsruhe, Germany. SMW+ is well suited for organizations or teams dealing with heterogeneous and informal workflows. SMW+ offers a rich feature set to create, share, publish and re-use knowledge contained in content. Ontoprise develops extensions to MediaWiki and carefully picks other useful extensions and, if having passed our quality assurance procedure, casts them into SMW+. Read more...

Who is Ontoprise?
Ontoprise GmbH based in Karlsruhe, Germany, is a leading software provider of ontology-based solutions. Ontologies structure relevant know-how of your company, no matter how complex the relations are and how widely the information is scattered throughout the enterprise. Read more...

What is "Project Halo"?
Vulcan Inc, based in Seattle, has established the long-term research program Project Halo to develop a “Digital Aristotle” that can serve as a comprehensive computer knowledge base and problem-solving system for natural sciences. Ontoprise GmbH has been elected as Vulcan's prime contractor to develop an extension (named "halo extension") to Semantic MediaWiki for Project Halo. The extended Semantic MediaWiki is serving as a web-based collaboration tool for the user-friendly and low-cost acquisition of scientific knowledge for Project Halo. Read more...

Why are you claiming SMW+ is a "semantic enterprise wiki"?
A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content quickly. Enterprises are adopting wikis more and more over the last years to make use of the wiki principle. Compared with other enterprise wikis SMW+ ranks under the top three enterprise wikis. SMW+ is a semantic enterprise wiki allowing casual users to include structured data into articles and, thus, organize articles in a graspable manner and to instantaneously exploit the data. Therefore SMW+ is a full blown knowledge management system combining a wiki's social authoring approach with proven semantic technology. Read more...

How does SMW+ compare to other enterprise wikis?
SMW+ is providing a competitive level for requirements requested by professional users in the fields of reliability in daily operation, ease of procurement, commercial support contracts, minimal training efforts, access control and scalability. Thanks to its semantic technologies SMW+ clearly outpaces non-semantic wikis in the fields of interoperability and expressivity. Read more...

How does SMW+ compare to other semantic wikis?
SMW+ is a semantic wiki since it heavily employs semantic technologies (i.e. typed links, taxonomy and inferencing). SMW+ outpaces other semantic wikis with respect to requirements requested by professional users (ease of procurement, commercial support contracts, interoperability). Thanks to its semantic technologies SMW+ competes with other semantic wikis regarding expressivity level but it offers the best trade off between expressivity and computability. Also, SMW+ users are efficiently supported with usability features to efficiently make use of the high level of expressivity. Read more...

Do you provide professional support?
When enterprises consider deploying a wiki then the availability of commercial support is imperative. Ontoprise accounts for the special needs of commercial implementations of SMW+ (and Semantic MediaWiki) by offering technical support contracts, training for administrators and end-users and consulting, custom software development and system integration. Read more...

What does "GPL" mean?
SMW+ is open source software. It is licenced under the GPL General Public License. This license grants you the right to distribute SMW+ in compliance with the conditions which are named in the GPL text. Read more...

What is the "Halo extension"?
Seattle-based Vulcan Inc has selected ontoprise GmbH as its prime contractor to develop an extension to Semantic MediaWiki for Project Halo; the extension is named Halo extension. The Halo extension improves Semantic MediaWiki in terms of interoperability and usability compared to competing semantic wikis. SMW+, ontoprise's business-ready distribution of Semantic MediaWiki including essential enhancements to it, comprises the Halo extension, too. Read more...

Where can I get more information?
You can browse the SMW+ community web site to find user manuals and examples of applications: http://smwforum.ontoprise.com.

Or simply drop us an email: [mailto:smwplus@ontoprise.com smwplus@ontoprise.com].