The KiWi core system is a flexible platform for building different kinds of semantic social software applications on top (currently the Semantic Wiki and the TagIT application). It provides all the core services required in such applications, like editing and tagging, the storage of content and associated meta-data, its own triple store, transactions and versioning over content and meta-data, linked open data server, and many small features semantic social software developers will like (like convenience services for working with ontologies or SKOS thesauruses, etc.). And finally: the KiWi system also has a quite neat user interface by now, rarely found in Semantic Web applications.

Technology-wise, the KiWi system is a component based architecture building on JBoss Seam and Java EE. The main principle is that everything is a content item, and that a content item always consists of human-readable content that is connected with RDF relations and may be annotated by users with semantic tags. This mixture allows content to be shared between applications: a content item that is created in the Wiki application can at the same time be displayed in TagIT as a location on the map or (later) as a blog post in the Blog application. This is made possible by the flexible structures offered by RDF. A particularly salient aspect of the KiWi core system is that it makes using RDF much more convenient for Java developers (no more manual triple store queries) by offering a flexible facading through interfaces annotated with special Java annotations that map Java methods to RDF properties.

KiWi can be downloaded in the following forms:

• a binary package that comes pre-configured with JBoss 4.2.3, the H2 database, and KiWi (the “one-click-install”). Unpack it and run bin/run.sh (or bin\run.bat) to start it, then go to http://localhost:8080/KiWi/, and start editing (or select “Admin” and pre-load ontologies); the binary package requires JDK 6 installed and can be downloaded from http://kenai.com/projects/kiwi/downloads
• a source package that can be used for looking into the KiWi source code and compiling yourself; it requires JDK6, plus JBoss 4.2.3 and a database supported by Hibernate (PostgreSQL, H2, …), and you will need some knowledge on how to configure Java EE applications; the source package can also be downloaded from http://kenai.com/projects/kiwi/downloads
• the most recent source code can always be obtained from the Subversion repository at https://svn.salzburgresearch.at/svn/kiwi/kWi/trunk ; if you plan to participate in the development of KiWi, this is your option - and don’t forget to tell us, if you have good ideas and contributions, we might want to add you as committer; obviously, this option has the same requirements as the packaged source package
• you can furthermore visit the Showcase (updated regularly, may crash from time to time) if you only want to have a quick look into how KiWi works and looks lik
• and you can check the Developers Page