[Toolserver-l] Experimental: Live template value search

[Christopher Sahnwaldt]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 10:25, Daniel Kinzler <daniel at brightbyte.de> wrote:
> Magnus Manske schrieb:
>> All in all, it would be much better directly integrated into MediaWiki
>> (no need for text retrieval/parsing, no bulk updates). But I've been
>> saying that for years, at least this is a first attempt.
>
> Actually, this is part of my grand plan for world domination. I'm pushing for it
> behind the scenes... I have a few ideas on how it may be done nicely.
>
> I think the main problem is that semantic mediawiki looks like the obvious
> answer. But i doubt it is. I only want a small subset of that functionality on
> wikipedia. Maybe SMW can be chopped up to fit that, but i'm personally more
> inclined to extend the RDF extension to store triples in the DB.

I'm pretty new to MediaWiki and I'm not sure if I understand
this correctly... Here's my attempt at spelling it out in a bit
more detail:

When a user edits a page and sends the new text to the
server, the server / the RDF extension parses the text, extracts
the desired data and saves it in a RDF store.

I hope I got that about right - please correct me if not!

Now when I think about the pros and cons of having this
process run integrated in MediaWiki or on a different server,
a few questions come up... again, I'm new to MediaWiki,
so these may be newbie questions... :-)

How much parsing does MediaWiki currently do when it stores
new text for an article? Are templates expanded / transcluded?

How are updates distributed? Do subscribers regularly poll
the server for recent changes? Or is there some kind of
store-and-forward / publish-subscribe?

Bye,
Christopher