Evan Prodromou wrote:
"DA" == Danny Ayers danny666@virgilio.it writes:
DA> This is all aside from how you'd get metadata from the Wiki - DA> there's all the mechanical stuff (e.g. page DA> creation/modification dates), stuff that can be semi-automated DA> (e.g. author) - management of this is pretty straightforward DA> to hook up to an existing system (most of it's probably DA> already there in the DB tables). Then there's stuff that's DA> entirely human-created. I reckon the MediaWiki is in an DA> excellent position to lead the way on how this is done (what DA> syntax etc.).
A lot of what's considered important metadata, from a World Wide Web standpoint, could already be provided from the MediaWiki database. Scanning over the Dublin Core element set:
http://www.dublincore.org/documents/dces/
...I don't think there's much that we couldn't encode either as RDF or in HTML link/meta tags. Yeah, I know, Dublin Core is only one part of the magical world that is RDF and the Semantic Web and so forth.
Whether we do that for MediaWiki is a separate question from how and whether we do editor-assigned name-value pairs.
~ESP
Yes: I've explored this in another project I'm working on, which is a Wiki-meets-database-meets-Semantic Web hybrid that is still at the early experimental stages of alpha development. Based on this, I think we can place our trust in the Wiki-nature first, and let bindings to the Semantic Web develop subsequent to this.
For example, it's likely that the Wikipedia community will choose [[author=...]] to mean the same as the http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator RDF predicate. Or maybe they'll want to write [[dc:creator=...]], to be extra sure?
It doesn't matter: we will naturally tend to absorb standards from the larger world, and things will sort themselves out.
-- Neil