18 May 2007
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SemanticMediaWiki Extension Installed
Now that we've upgraded to MediaWiki 1.10 we're able to install the SemanticMediaWiki (SMW) extension without needing to modify any of the MediaWiki include files.
SMW is an extension of MediaWiki with semantic technology, thus turning it into a semantic wiki. While articles in MediaWiki are just plain texts, SMW allows users to add structured data, comparable to the data one would usually store in a database. SMW uses the fact that such data is already contained in many articles: users just need to "mark" the according places so that the system can extract the relevant data without understanding the rest of the text. With this information, SMW can help to search, organise, browse, evaluate, and share the wiki's content.
As well as adding the ability to include relational links within article content, SMW adds many new special pages for querying and maintaining the data, such as Export pages to RDF, Search by relation and Semantic search.
Semantic MediaWiki is used on many other sites and has also been featured in the press. I've also installed a companion extension called SemanticForms which allows you to have forms for adding and editing data on your wiki, without any programming.
