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(a)prodromou.name>
http://evan.prodromou.name/