Agile elicitation of semantic goals by wiki

Formal goal and service descriptions are the shibboleth of the semantic web services approach, yet the people responsible for creating them are neither machines nor logicians, and rarely even knowledge engineers: the people who need and specify functionality are not those who provide it, and both may be distinct from the semantic annotators. The gap between users' informal conceptualisations of problems and formal descriptions is one which must be effectively bridged for semantic web services to be widely adopted. We show how a simple technique-using a wiki to collect user requirements and mediate a progressive, iterative refinement and formalisation of user goals by domain experts and their knowledge engineer colleagues-can achieve this. Further, we suggest how the process could be extended, so as to itself benefit from semantic technologies.