Slashdot Mirror

What we really need is for Wikipedia to move over to Semantic MediaWiki; it should be a painless transition. I really think that it would be widely used -- once people see it in use in some articles, they're more likely to use it in other articles, in the same way that people learn most of Wikipedia's formatting. With wide use of semantic tags (esp. if an ontology was used as well), the entire knowledge base of Wikipedia could be intelligently queried. Want to know all trees that can grow to more than 60 meters high? Want to know what insects have yellow heads and four wings? Want to know what countries have a GDP between 5 and 10 billion dollars? You could do it.

Ok I bit and took a look and what did I find? Viagra.

http://ontoworld.org/wiki/Talk:Semantic_Web_Topic_ Hierarchy/

I challenge everyone to take a look at:

http://wiki.ontoworld.org/

It will take a while to understand and you'll probably need to read the instructions. But if you can imagine a more user-friendly version of this Wiki you'll begin to see why the Semantic Web is such a powerful idea. Yes, big corporations can really help launch a technology but they are not the be all and end all. Small businesses have played a big role in the emergence of new technologies. Remember those really small companies like Google, MySpace and Netscape?

My gut tells me the semantic web will take off. It won't be a utopia and won't fulfil all the promises, but like so many technologies, it will make things a little better than before.

Cedars.

I challenge everyone to take a look at:

http://wiki.ontoworld.org/

It will take a while to understand and you'll probably need to read the instructions. But if you can imagine a more user-friendly version of this Wiki you'll begin to see why the Semantic Web is such a powerful idea. Yes, big corporations can really help launch a technology but they are not the be all and end all. Small businesses have played a big role in the emergence of new technologies. Remember those really small companies like Google, MySpace and Netscape?

My gut tells me the semantic web will take off. It won't be a utopia and won't fulfil all the promises, but like so many technologies, it will make things a little better than before.

Cedars.

People are stupid and lazy. I know I am. And we use the same words to mean different things, and different words to mean the same thing. The Semantic Web requires people to be smart and hardworking, and to use standardized vocabularies in standardized ways. Decades of failed or at best partially successful data exchange protocols strongly suggest that these requirements will not be fulfilled.

A quite standardized vocabulary actually exist in Wikipedia (markup language, templates, categories).
Here is a list of links that try to combine wikipedia and the semantic web:

http://wiki.ontoworld.org/index.php/Semantic_Wiki_ State_Of_The_Art
http://wiki.ontoworld.org/wiki/Sites_using_Semanti c_MediaWiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Semant ic_Wikipedia
http://www2006.org/programme/item.php?id=4039
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki

People are stupid and lazy. I know I am. And we use the same words to mean different things, and different words to mean the same thing. The Semantic Web requires people to be smart and hardworking, and to use standardized vocabularies in standardized ways. Decades of failed or at best partially successful data exchange protocols strongly suggest that these requirements will not be fulfilled.

A quite standardized vocabulary actually exist in Wikipedia (markup language, templates, categories).
Here is a list of links that try to combine wikipedia and the semantic web:

http://wiki.ontoworld.org/index.php/Semantic_Wiki_ State_Of_The_Art
http://wiki.ontoworld.org/wiki/Sites_using_Semanti c_MediaWiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Semant ic_Wikipedia
http://www2006.org/programme/item.php?id=4039
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki

To start hacking on the awesome Semantic MediaWiki extensions, I downloaded XAMPPLITE (MySQL, PHP, Apache, and phpMyAdmin all nicely bundled for Windows) and the MediaWiki source. I had it up and running on Windows XP in 10 minutes!

For PHP development, I downloaded Eclipse and the PHPEclipse extension. I already had Cygwin and Vim installed, but I don't think you need them.

I've also used TWiki at work. The benefit of MediaWiki is the users' familiarity with Wikipedia.

Semantic MediaWiki adds attributes to articles (e.g. [[telephone:=555-1234]] ) and typed relations between articles (e.g. [[works for::Joe_Smith]] that you can query. So you can get information from articles without reading each one. Amazing stuff.

• The Semantic MediaWiki:

  Provides a common platform for discussing extensions of the MediaWiki software that allow for simple, machine-based processing of Wiki content. This usually requires some form of "semantic annotation," but the special Wiki environment and the multitude of envisaged applications impose a number of additional requirements.

• A Semantic MediaWiki demo wiki:

  This site runs a demo of the Semantic Web extension to the MediaWiki-Software that runs Wikipedia.

• WikiSense - Mining the Wiki by Daniel Kinzler:

  I would like to present a project that aims to apply techniques of data-mining and knowledge-management to the Wikipedia corpus. The idea is to extract semantic relations directly from the link structure, as opposed to trying to analyze natural language. Wikipedia is an excellent basis for such an analysis because every node in the web of links represents exactly one topic. The results may be used to benefit the Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects. Key points are support of multilingual features and computer aided structuring.

• Wikipedia and the Semantic Web - The Missing Links by Markus Krötzsch, Denny Vrandei, and Max Völkel:

  The current excessive usage of article lists and categories witnesses the fact that 19th century content organization technologies like inter-article references and indices are no longer sufficient for today's needs. Rather, it is necessary to allow knowledge processing in a computer assisted way, for example to intelligently query the knowledge base. To this end, we propose the introduction of typed links as an extremely simple and unintrusive way for rendering large parts of Wikipedia machine readable.

• Wikidata (an 'outdated' proposal but with links to superseding discussions):

  Imagine that you can edit the content of an infobox on Wikipedia (e.g. Germany) with one click, that you get an edit form specific to the infobox you are editing, and that other Wikipedias automatically and immediately use the same content (unless it is specific to your locale). Imagine that some data in an article can be automatically updated in the background, without any work from you - whether it is the development of a company stock, or the number of lines of code in an open source project. Imagine that you can easily search wiki-databases on a variety of subjects, without knowing anything about wikis.

• WikiDB:

  WikiDB is a PHP software that allow to create cooperatively data table online. It is inspired by WikiWiki system for cooperative aspect and by PHPMyAdmin for the interface.

A moderation system has already been implimented in Mediawiki, and is currently going through a shakedown on one of the test wikis. See for yourself here.

The Semantic Wiki page on Wikipedia is a good starting point. I have also written my own overview, including an annotated list of known efforts. Finally, the Semantic Wiki Interest Group is the best place to go to get involved or watch for new developments.

I am particularly interested in the possibility of augmenting wikis with mechanically-derived content. For example, there could be a Doxygen-style wiki page for each function and data structure in a system. Users could create new pages and/or annotate mechanically-generated pages. I am working on a specification for a wiki that could support such a system, but it's still quite speculative.