Hi all,
here are my two (point five) cents as SMW developer:
(1) Yes, SMW needs to be tuned for being used in Wikipedia. It has many
settings to enable or disable features, and some features are clearly too
much for one of the worlds-largest sites. The default settings, for obvious
reasons, are not tuned for Wikipedia ;-)
(2) SMW consists of many independent components. Especially, its common syntax
[[property::value]] is a *tiny* (30 lines of PHP ;-) part of the system, and
can readily be replaced by anything you like (including templates). So
the "standardised templates" vs. "typed links" is really just a minor
issue!
But whenever I see people discussing SMW, I see talks about syntax and query
performance. Syntax can be changed easily and queries can even be turned off,
and still SMW is useful! Here are some things that SMW provides beyond
parsing square brackets:
** Datatype parsing, partly internationalised. E.g. the system recognises
that "+1234" is the same number as "1.234,0", support for
Gregorian-Julian
calendar conversion is coming, and geographical coordinates can already be
written in many ways. This is computationally cheap, but you will want that
for template-based structuring as well.
** Storage. SMW has an object oriented storage API so that the storage (DB
tables or whatever) can be changed without changing the rest of the code. It
provides internal object-models and data structures that are useful for
dealing with structured data. Why reinvent all that or handle data values as
plain strings internally?
** Export. SMW has various interfaces to directly export data to other
systems. In addition to the long-standing RDF/XML export, we now also have
iCal support, and direct connections to "semantic" datastores that can also
be hosted on different servers. This means that all data entered in the wiki
is directly written into a separate database which has its own standard query
interfaces (the SPARQL query language typically being the method of choice).
No need to use SMW's internal query engine if this is too stressful for
servers.
** Extensions. Things like SemanticForms (form input) or SemanticLayers
(embedded maps beyond Google) already use SMW APIs internally and still need
not be computationally problematic.
(2.5) All apologies to the BetaWiki guys -- we really want to join as soon as
possible (and it should be possible!).
Cheers,
Markus
On Mittwoch, 16. April 2008, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi,
One bit of revision that has been scheduled before Wikimania 2008 is
changing the localisation of Semantic MediaWiki in order to have it
supported in Betawiki. Compared to the version we saw demonstrated at
Wikimania 2007 SMW has become a lot easier to use. The performance and
scalability has improved a lot so a lot of revision has been done. This
does not mean that more review would not be welcome, it does mean that it
is not that obvious that Semantic MediaWiki should be ruled out.
Thanks,
GerardM
On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 3:23 PM, Simetrical
<Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com<Simetrical%2Bwikilist@gmail.com>>
wrote:
On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 1:02 AM, S Page
<info(a)skierpage.com> wrote:
At the risk of making a stupid answer: you could
install the Semantic
MediaWiki extension
Probably most of us know of SMW. The goal here appears to be to get
something enabled on Wikipedia, which rules out SMW without an
extremely large amount of review and (presumably) revision.
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Markus Krötzsch
Institut AIFB, Universität Karlsruhe (TH), 76128 Karlsruhe
phone +49 (0)721 608 7362 fax +49 (0)721 608 5998
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