The Effect of Using a Semantic Wiki for Metadata Management: A Controlled Experiment

A coherent and consistent understanding of corporate data is an important factor for effective management of diversified companies and implies a need for company-wide unambiguous data definitions. Inspired by the success of Wikipedia, Wiki software has become a broadly discussed alternative for corporate metadata management. However, in contrast to the performance and sustainability of Wikis in general, benefits of using semantic Wikis have not been investigated sufficiently.The paper at hand presents results of a controlled experiment that investigates effects of using a semantic Wiki for metadata management in comparison to a classical Wiki. Considering threats to validity, the analysis (i.e. 74 subjects using both a classical and a semantic Wiki) shows that the semantic Wiki is superior to the classical variant regarding information retrieval tasks. At the same time, the results indicate that more effort is needed to build up the semantically annotated Wiki content in the semantic Wiki.