[Toolserver-l] Experimental: Live template value search

[Daniel Kinzler]

Christopher Sahnwaldt schrieb:
> 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!

More or less - the parser parses the text, and hands the bit that is RDF
(turtle) to the RDF-Extension for analysis. It analyzes the statements and would
save it to the database (this is not yet implemented).

> 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?

There is a preprocessor that expands all templates recursively. After that, the
real "parser" (read: munger) is invoked to turn wiki text into HTML.

In the case of a "semantified" infobox, the substitution process would generate
RDF/Turtle statements using the template parameters. These would in turn be
handed to the RDF extension, which would write the resulting triples to the
database.

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

There is the RSS/Atom feed (human readable, not easy to parse), and an OAI-PMH
interface ("life update feed"). There's also the web API for polling data in a
machine readable form, and there's the RC ("recent changes") channel on IRC
(human readable, can't be parsed reliably). True XMPP based pubsub is being
worked on, see <http://brightbyte.de/page/RecentChanges_via_Jabber>.

-- daniel