About

Makna

The main idea is to combine the simplicity of the Wiki-Way with the power of the semantic web while keeping advantages from both technologies. An attempt to reach that is to provide an easy and user-friendly user interface and powerful technologies in the background.

Makna stands for "knowledge" in bahasa indonesia ("indonesian").

About

Makna was developed at the working group Network based Information Systems at the Free University Berlin. It started as a student project by Karsten Dello and is based on an idea of Prof. Robert Tolksdorf and Elena Paslaru who also supervised it.

The engine implementation is based on Janne Jalkanen's JSPWiki, and the Semantic-Web-Engine used is HP's Jena.

http://makna.ag-nbi.de/ is the demo instance, which also serves as a sandbox. All pages are editable.

Features

Support for ontologies

Each Wiki-Instance can be configured to use one or more ontologies that suits its topic. The engine supports RDFS and OWL ontologies and the reasoner can be chosen as well.

Consistence

Based on the ontologies the application guarantees, that the semantic model is consistent at any time.

User-Friendly Assistants for editing and searching

Assistants for searching predicates and pages (on the Edit-Page), as well as for formulating statements and queries "with the mouse only" are provided.

Persistant storage of semantic content

Configurable backend system, supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle.

Easy-To-Use Wiki-Syntax

JSPWiki's syntax has been extended to provide "semantic linking". For Details please see MaknaSyntax.

About this demo

The schematas used in this demo are FOAF, the Relationship Ontology and two modified subsets of the IMDB-Schema and Danny Ayer's Pet Ontology.

Getting it

Download

The software is released at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/makna. You can get a source-release, an precompiled War-File as well as the samplepages in the download-area.

Documentation

If you want to try it, please have a look at MaknaInstallation for installation instructions. There is not much documentation yet, In case you want to get it contact with the author just send us an email.