Semantic Mediawiki

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Semantic Mediawiki

Turn your wiki into a collaborative database. Semantic Mediawiki brings the dream of the semantic web closer to reality.

Semantic Mediawiki (SMW) is a widely implemented extension of Mediawiki that lets users add "semantic annotations that allow a wiki to function as a collaborative database"¹. You end up with a seamless tool that connects an ontology to the wiki and ultimately to the end user.

Wikis are a fantastic tool that allows groups to collaboratively build and share knowledge - usually in the form of text and multimedia. Semantic Mediawiki is an open source extension that takes it a step further by creating a simple interface for users to semantically organise and tag data so that it can be processed by a computer.

What are the benefits of taking this approach? For example, Wikipedia holds an enormous amount of information that can be searched for using keywords. If you're looking for a definition or overview of a topic then Wikipedia can be a great place to start. However, it's not possible to ask Wikipedia to answer the following question:

How did Google, Apple and Microsoft stocks perform from 2005-2009?

The facts may be available in Wikipedia, but unless a human editor has written an article answering this question, Wikipedia is not built to quickly find solutions to these kinds of problems.

SMW has come a long way from its first release in 2005. It has inspired a whole family of its own extensions including: Semantic Forms, Semantic Drilldown, Semantic Result Formats, Halo, Semantic Maps. The combination of these tools offers power functionality such as¹:

Automatically-generated lists - list are generated automatically rather than manually created and edited
Visual display of information - display visual data such as maps, calendars, graphs and timelines
Improved data structure - consistent and simplified data structure based on ontologies
Advanced search filters - users can customise search queries and filters
External reuse - data can be exported into formats like CSV and RDF

Here's an example of what the annotation screen looks like:

Semantic Mediawiki is used on many public sites including Metacafe, SNPedia, Metavid, MetaBase and the Math Images Project. See SMW in action by browsing for sites that have implemented the extension: http://smw.referata.com/wiki/Special:BrowseData/Sites.

Sources:

1. "Introduction to Semantic MediaWiki". Semantic Mediawiki. Last modified July 31, 2009. http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Introduction_to_Semantic_MediaWiki