Dear Wikipedia-Wizards,
we are a group of four researchers building an extension for
Wikipedia, called the "Semantic Wikipedia", which is technically a
MediaWiki extension.
The project is described here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki
can be used as a demo here:
http://wiki.ontoworld.org
As a short summary, it allows users to type links, which yields to
the creation of semantic metadata (page name, link type, link
target). In a similar fashion we allow for the annotation of
attributes. If this project will be deployed on Wikipedia, a huge
amount of machine-processable data could be generated. We will
provide an RDF export per page and a SPARQL-query endpoint for the
whole Semantic Wikipedia (SPARQL is like SQL, but more adapted to
the data model of RDF, a building block of the semantic web).
Currently, we have two problems and would be glad if you help us:
1.
The tool stack in the semantic web community is mainly built on
Java. For C, there is only on "triple store" (which is needed for
efficient RDF storage & querying). The only candiadate we have,
"3store" is not very mature - but many Java stores are. Especially
the open-source system "Sesame" (
openrdf.org) would be our choice
for implementation. But, as far as I understand Wikipedia, Java is
not open source enough, as there is no open source implementation of
Java itself? Is this true or just a rumor?
2.
Syntax. We had to extend the syntax slightly to enable annotations
of links and data values. Currently we settled down to use
[[link type::link target|optional alternate label]]
Sample, on page "London": ... is in [[located in::England]] ...
Renders as: ... is in England .... (England = Linked)
for relations, and for attributes.
[[attribute type:=data value with unit|optional alternate label]]
Sample, on page "London": ... rains on [[rain:=234 days/year]] ....
Renders as .... rains on 234 days/year (nothing linked)
For a full explanation of whay and what we try to do,
you can also have a look at a paper, which we wrote for a
conference:
http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/Publikationen/showPublikation_english?publ…
BTW: I promised Jimmy (in San Diego) to explain him, what the semantic web
is. I still work on that :-)
Thanks a lot in advance,
Kind regards,
Max Völkel
--
Dipl.-Inform. Max Völkel
University of Karlsruhe, AIFB, Knowledge Management Group
mvo(a)aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de +49 721 608-4754
www.xam.de