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