An interesting wiki with some powerful features: Some of it's
philosophies are being adopted by google.
Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an extension of MediaWiki – the wiki
application best known for powering Wikipedia – that helps to search,
organise, tag, browse, evaluate, and share the wiki's content. While
traditional wikis contain only text which computers can neither
understand nor evaluate, SMW adds semantic annotations that allow a
wiki to function as a collaborative database. Semantic MediaWiki was
first released in 2005, and currently has over ten developers, and is
in use on hundreds of sites. In addition, a large number of related
extensions have been created that extend the ability to edit, display
and browse through the data stored by SMW: the term "Semantic
MediaWiki" is sometimes used to refer to this entire family of
extensions.
Semantic MediaWiki has been funded in part by projects of the
Framework Programmes (FP) of the European Union, SEKT and ACTIVE and
by project Halo.
Contents
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* 1 Why Semantic Mediawiki?
* 2 Where SMW can help
* 3 Who is using Semantic MediaWiki?
* 4 More information
* 5 Contact and user support
Why Semantic Mediawiki?
Wikis have become a great tool for collecting and sharing knowledge in
communities. This knowledge is mostly contained within texts and
multimedia files, and is thus easily accessible for human readers. But
though wikis are very good for storing and retrieving individual
facts, they are less useful for getting queried or aggregated
information.. As a simple example, consider the following question:
«What are the hundred world-largest cities with a female mayor?»
Wikipedia should be able to provide the answer: it contains all large
cities, their mayors, and articles about the mayor that tell us about
their gender. Yet the question is almost impossible to answer for a
human, since one would have to read all articles about all large
cities first! Even if the answer is found, it might not remain valid
for very long. Computers can deal with large datasets much easier, yet
they are not able to support us very much when seeking answers from a
wiki: Even sophisticated programs cannot yet read and «understand»
human-language texts unless the topic and language of the text is very
restricted. The wiki's keyword search does not help either.
Semantic MediaWiki enables wikis to make their knowledge
computer-processable, e.g. to answer the above question.
Where SMW can help
Semantic MediaWiki introduces some additional markup into the
wiki-text which allows users to add "semantic annotations" to the
wiki. While this first appears to make things more complex, it can
also greatly simplify the structure of the wiki, help users to find
more information in less time, and improve the overall quality and
consistency of the wiki. Here are some of the benefits of using SMW:
* Automatically-generated lists. Wikis tend to contain many
aggregated lists; Wikipedia itself has thousands, like "List of
metropolitan areas in Spain by population". Those lists are prone to
errors, since they have to be updated manually. Furthermore, the
number of potentially interesting lists is huge, and it is impossible
to provide all of them in acceptable quality. In SMW, lists are
generated automatically like this. They are always up-to-date and can
easily be customised to obtain further information.
* Visual display of information. The various display formats
defined by additional extensions, such as Semantic Result Formats and
Semantic Maps, allow for displaying of information in calendars,
timelines, graphs and maps, among others, providing a much richer view
of the data than simple lists would.
* Improved data structure. MediaWiki wikis tend to make heavy use
of categories for structuring data. While these are generally helpful,
consider the categories on Wikipedia called "Rivers in
Buckinghamshire" and "1620s deaths"; if the information in these pages
were stored using SMW, these categories could be replaced by simple
queries, reducing the need for a complex classification system. In
addition, if semantic markup within the wiki is stored within
templates, otherwise known as semantic templates, a wiki can easily
gain a solid data structure. And the Semantic Forms extension lets
administators create forms for adding and editing the data within
semantic templates, thus making the addition of semantic information
possibly even easier and more straightforward than regular wiki text.
* Searching information. Individual users can search for specific
information by creating their own queries, supported via extensions
like Halo and Semantic Drilldown.
* Inter-language consistency. In wikis that span multiple
languages, like Wikipedia, there is often a great deal of data
redundancy, which can lead to inconsistencies. For example, the
population of Edinburgh at the time of this writing is different in
the English, German, and French Wikipedias. If data is stored
semantically, you could, for instance, ask for the population of
Bejing that is given in the Chinese Wikipedia without knowing a single
word of that language. This can be exploited to have different
languages query one another's data, either for reuse or at least to
detect inconsistencies.
* External reuse. Data, once it is created in an SMW wiki, does
not have to remain within the wiki; it can easily be exported via
formats like CSV, JSON and RDF. This enables an SMW wiki to serve as a
data source for other applications, or, in the case of enterprise
usages, to take over the role that a relational database would
normally play. Through the use of the External Data extension and the
result format Exhibit, one SMW-based wiki can even use the data from
another, eliminating the need for redundancy between wikis. You can
also query SMW's data via an RDF triplestore, using any of the
available triplestore connector extensions.
* Integrate and mash-up data. Data contained in an SMW
installation does not have to be an isolated store of information.
Extensions such as the Data Import, Data Transfer and External Data
extensions empower you to integrate external data (coming e.g. from
legacy systems, web services or linked data sources) and interrelate
it with existing semantic data in the wiki. Thus, an SMW-powered wiki
can serve as a central information hub in an IT landscape.
Who is using Semantic MediaWiki?
Semantic MediaWiki has grown a long way from its roots as an academic
research project. It is currently in active use in hundreds of sites,
in many languages, around the world, including Fortune 500 companies,
biomedical projects, government agencies and consumer directories. The
Wikipedia article on Semantic MediaWiki contains a section listing
some of its notable usages. You can also see one list of the sites
that use SMW here, and another here. It should be noted that both
lists focus on public sites, although perhaps half or more of the
sites that use Semantic MediaWiki are private, for internal use by
companies and organizations.
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