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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Permaculture wikis & making a major impact

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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Permaculture wikis & making a major impact
  • Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 02:57:47 -0500


One more to complete an introductory picture of Semantic MediaWiki for those interested. The database-like query possibilities of SMW are very interesting. This sentence sort of sums it up: "But though wikis are very good for storing and retrieving individual facts, they are less useful for getting queried or aggregated information." Amazing that this app development happened and is available to us. See bottom of post:

Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:
Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:
Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:
Chris Watkins wrote:

There's a misconception that wikis will magically create a useful resource,
Well, here's a little magic that could be made to happen:
http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki
"Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is a free extension of MediaWiki – the wiki-system powering Wikipedia – that helps to search, organise, tag, browse, evaluate, and share the wiki's content. While traditional wikis contain only text which computers can neither understand nor evaluate, SMW adds semantic annotations that let you easily publish Semantic Web content, and allow the wiki to function as a collaborative database."

Note: " allow the wiki to function as a collaborative database".
This is what we have been wanting for half a decade.
An enlightening testimonial about SMW:

http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Testimonials

"SMW is best of breed: open source with a very active community, bringing together Web 2.0 (wikis) with the Semantic Web, thus contributing to the emerging Social Semantic Web. An ideal mix to combine the textual power of wikis with features of online databases and semantics.

Bernhard Krabina, KDZ - Centre for Public Administration Research "


So, it appears that there are user communities dedicated to a particular subject that are becoming cyber communities united around the Semantic Web architecture. We could be the first to originate the Permaculture Semantic Web. Talk about a unifying global permaculture resource. This could be what we are all wanting and needing.

Another interesting testimonial:

"I built a dynamic character sheet for the players of my game, in MediaWiki. It's been a breeze to maintain and update, I've got almost 200 pages or so feeding data into a single page through semantic data. It's a very powerful extension and I only wish all wikis had this kind of functionality.
Brendan Crosser-McGay"

Interesting that markup is so concentrated that 200 pages of data can be
thoroughly acces by one SMW page.
All my posting and replying with snippets here could and should be done in a Wiki page. Problem is those interested knowing it is there. Could create the wiki page then post a link here and ask for feedback. This thread could also exist in the pcdb list, for wiki developers rather than end users.

Why Semantic Mediawiki?

Wikis have become a great tool for collecting and sharing knowledge in communities. This knowledge is mostly contained within texts and multimedia files, and is thus easily accessible for human readers. But though wikis are very good for storing and retrieving individual facts, they are less useful for getting queried or aggregated information.. As a simple example, consider the following question:

«What are the hundred world-largest cities with a female mayor?»

Wikipedia should be able to provide the answer: it contains all large cities, their mayors, and articles about the mayor that tell us about their gender. Yet the question is almost impossible to answer for a human, since one would have to read all articles about all large cities first! Even if the answer is found, it might not remain valid for very long. Computers can deal with large datasets much easier, yet they are not able to support us very much when seeking answers from a wiki: Even sophisticated programs cannot yet read and «understand» human-language texts unless the topic and language of the text is very restricted. The wiki's keyword search does not help either.

Semantic MediaWiki enables wikis to make their knowledge computer-processable, e.g. to answer the above question.
Where SMW can help

Semantic MediaWiki introduces some additional markup into the wiki-text which allows users to add "semantic annotations" to the wiki. While this first appears to make things more complex, it can also greatly simplify the structure of the wiki, help users to find more information in less time, and improve the overall quality and consistency of the wiki. Here are some of the benefits of using SMW:

* Automatically-generated lists. Wikis tend to contain many aggregated lists; Wikipedia itself has thousands, like "List of metropolitan areas in Spain by population". Those lists are prone to errors, since they have to be updated manually. Furthermore, the number of potentially interesting lists is huge, and it is impossible to provide all of them in acceptable quality. In SMW, lists are generated automatically like this. They are always up-to-date and can easily be customised to obtain further information.

* Visual display of information. The various display formats defined by additional extensions, such as Semantic Result Formats and Semantic Maps, allow for displaying of information in calendars, timelines, graphs and maps, among others, providing a much richer view of the data than simple lists would.

* Improved data structure. MediaWiki wikis tend to make heavy use of categories for structuring data. While these are generally helpful, consider the categories on Wikipedia called "Rivers in Buckinghamshire" and "1620s deaths"; if the information in these pages were stored using SMW, these categories could be replaced by simple queries, reducing the need for a complex classification system. In addition, if semantic markup within the wiki is stored within templates, otherwise known as semantic templates, a wiki can easily gain a solid data structure. And the Semantic Forms extension lets administators create forms for adding and editing the data within semantic templates, thus making the addition of semantic information possibly even easier and more straightforward than regular wiki text.

* Searching information. Individual users can search for specific information by creating their own queries, supported via extensions like Halo and Semantic Drilldown.

* Inter-language consistency. In wikis that span multiple languages, like Wikipedia, there is often a great deal of data redundancy, which can lead to inconsistencies. For example, the population of Edinburgh at the time of this writing is different in the English, German, and French Wikipedias. If data is stored semantically, you could, for instance, ask for the population of Bejing that is given in the Chinese Wikipedia without knowing a single word of that language. This can be exploited to have different languages query one another's data, either for reuse or at least to detect inconsistencies.

* External reuse. Data, once it is created in an SMW wiki, does not have to remain within the wiki; it can easily be exported via formats like CSV, JSON and RDF. This enables an SMW wiki to serve as a data source for other applications, or, in the case of enterprise usages, to take over the role that a relational database would normally play. Through the use of the External Data extension and the result format Exhibit, one SMW-based wiki can even use the data from another, eliminating the need for redundancy between wikis. You can also query the semantic data in SMW from remote and feed the query results into other applications. This can e.g. be realized via the Triple Store Connector.

* Integrate and mash-up data. Data contained in an SMW installation does not have to be an isolated store of information. Extensions such as the Data Import, Data Transfer and External Data extensions empower you to integrate external data (coming e.g. from legacy systems, web services or linked data sources) and interrelate it with existing semantic data in the wiki. Thus, an SMW-powered wiki can serve as a central information hub in an IT landscape.




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