On Mon, 2007-22-01 at 15:38 +0000, Rob Church wrote:
I think we can only really answer that question if we actually plan the thing properly, and to do that, we need to know
a. what we mean by "metadata" b. how we would use it
It's all well and good implementing huge catch-all solutions like Wikidata and Semantic MediaWiki, but they're pretty much sledgehammer to a nut if we haven't identified example use cases for this data. Obviously, what we use it for will lead in to how our users access it, and from there, the all important queries I know Domas loves to optimise to hell and back.
I'll go ahead and plug the existing RDF extension:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/RDF/
It works pretty darn well, plugs into existing MW without a patch, and supports an incremental approach to metadata implementation.
I've had it in production on Wikitravel for more than a year; we use it for applications as diverse as mapping, geographical hierarchy, and article status.
The system works with a custom <rdf> tag, in which you can put Turtle RDF (a very simple RDF syntax). So I can say that Evan lives in Montreal by writing:
<rdf> person:Evan :livesIn place:Montreal . </rdf>
...or something similar. It works fine with the templating system, so you could make a template Template:LivesIn with this content:
<rdf> person:{{{1}}} :livesIn place:{{{2}}} . </rdf>
...and then use it like {{LivesIn|Evan|Montreal}}.
And, yes, I did have to be tricky in order to get template arguments to expand within a custom tag.
-Evan
________________________________________________________________________ Evan Prodromou evan@prodromou.name http://evan.prodromou.name/