Semantic MediaWiki: A Collaborative Database Framework Yaron Koren Lotico New York Semantic Web meetup March 14, 2013
About me Yaron Koren – live in New York City. MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki developer, consultant, author and entrepreneur. My company: WikiWorks
Wiki ● A website where the contents can be edited via the browser. ● Wikis can be public or private – many companies use them for internal knowledge management. ● Around 10 major applications exist for running a wiki – some open source, some proprietary. ● The most popular wiki is Wikipedia.
Semantic wiki A wiki where data, not just text, can be stored and edited collaboratively.
MediaWiki ● The world's most popular wiki software ● Powers Wikipedia and related sites like Wiktionary and Wikiquote ● Also powers Wikia, the most popular “wiki farm” ● Open source software, written in PHP ● Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation and many volunteers.
Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) ● A popular MediaWiki extension ● First developed in 2005 by Markus Krötzsch and Denny Vrandečić ● Provides a framework for storing and querying data, turning MediaWiki into semantic wiki software
Semantic MediaWiki has taken on a life of its own ● The dominant semantic wiki software – nothing else comes close ● In use on over 500 active wikis ● About 30 active extensions rely on it ● Has its own mailing lists and website ● Has its own twice-yearly conference: SMWCon (next SMWCon is next week, in New York City!)
SMW and Wikidata Wikidata – a new project (started in April 2012) that is creating a single, massive database of cross- language information, to be used by Wikipedia. Wikidata does not use SMW – but some of SMW was spun off into a separate library, to be used by both. Also, some of the Wikidata team consists of SMW developers (including Denny Vrandečić)
SMW-based extensions ● SMW provides the framework for storing and querying data, through special tags ● Other extensions provide helpful additional functionality for creating, editing, browsing, visualizing, monitoring, etc. this data ● When used altogether, the software can turn a wiki into something more like a “collaborative database”
Visualizations in SMW ● lists ● tables ● graphs/charts ● maps ● calendars, timelines ● etc.
Calendar display
Timeline display
Map display
Drill-down interface
Drill-down interface (2)
Oh yes, and Semantic MediaWiki can store and export data in RDF.
Semantic Forms ● Created by me in 2007 ● May be the most important extension to Semantic MediaWiki (but I'm biased) ● Lets admins create forms for creating and editing pages, where each field holds a semantic value ● Semantics + structure = a great combination!
Demos!
More information My book, “Working with MediaWiki”, published November 2012 – covers all of MediaWiki and SMW
More information MediaWiki: mediawiki.org Semantic MediaWiki: semantic-mediawiki.org Referata, a wiki farm, where you can create an SMW- based wiki for free: referata.com
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