On Monday 10 April 2006 04:33, HumanCell .org wrote:
PS. Just found Semantic MediaWiki which looks very interesting.
Yes, this could indeed be a nice use case for this extension. It gives you some more freedom for describing relationships between your articles, and maybe there are also other properties that one could associate with some compounds (e.g. molecular mass).
Easy export of RDF is one obvious advange, but I'm not sure what other benefits there are of using the extension.
As you have seen, the extension currently is in development. Right now it is mostly useful if you have external software to work on (parts of) your data. In this case, you could use the RDF export to reuse wiki-data elsewhere, e.g. in some search or statistics service. For instance we have an (experimental) external service set up where you can ask advanced queries over the data, but this part is Java at the moment. Improved non-Java internal search functions are planned, but not included in the current version yet.
Here is an example of any entry (no taxonomic information is shown): http://www.humancell.org/index.php/CHEBI15334
The data I see there is of course highly specific, and I am not sure how a search engine for such structures should even look like. So the bottleneck for processing this data might not be the task of getting it into a standard format like RDF, but to find a usable application that allows you to do thing like to search for certain (implicit) chemical/structural features in your compound base. Since you work with templates, annotation can actually be done without too much effort by just evaluating the template (as in the German "Personendaten" project). Semantic MediaWiki can also be used to annotate templates, so you need not bother with annotating the articles themselves.
If the taxonomy is all that you need, categories could also be a sufficient solution -- the displayed article names really seem to be your only problem here. Would it help to create redirects between articles with nice names and articles with ugly names (note that you would also have to use "plus" for "+" etc.)? If the category mechanism is used only for browsing, then this might already suffice.
I agree, I had thought of using redirects too and I think this is the way to go.