Semantic MediaWiki: A Collaborative Database Framework Yaron Koren - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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

• f 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