On Thursday 12 July 2007 01:56, David Gerard wrote:
On 10/07/07, Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Damned if
I wasn't thinking about this sort of thing a couple hours
ago while washing up...the vision I had was a device in the home which
would respond to queries, so one could ask, "Wikipedia, how long is
the Great Wall of China", and get an audible response within a
reasonable response time.
That is more or less the extent of the thought, and while there are a
lot of questions and issues to be resolved around it, I see no reason
it couldn't become a reality within a few years.
SemanticWiki would be a key feature in making that idea a reality.
Parsing the plain text articles can only provide very limited data for
answering such questions.
Infoboxes and so forth are very popular on en:wp - Google already uses
{{coord}} like this, but the other infoboxes are a pretty good source
of this sort of parseable data. Note that infoboxes are not entirely
consistent as yet.
Note that the general input parsing of Semantic MediaWiki is rather simple
(using a special markup for data items) -- most of our work went into storage
systems, diverse UIs, querying, and data export. It would be easy to use all
of this with alternative/additional input methods, if you have any. You can
also add Semantic MW markup to templates to directly work with existing data
just as you suggest (given that your template data turns out to
be "parseable"). You can also add new parsing methods if you encounter
syntactical forms of data that are not understood by our current datatype
parsers. Most of this should work in quite a modular way without requiring
internal changes in Semantic MediaWiki.
-- Markus
--
Markus Krötzsch
Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, D-76128 Karlsruhe
mak(a)aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de phone +49 (0)721 608 7362
www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/ fax +49 (0)721 693 717