Tag Archives: Semantic MediaWiki

Thomas Thurner

KiWi Software Package Released – Call for KiWi Snow Camp

by , Category: Internet & Media, Knowledge Management, Social Software, Software Development, Tools & Software
The 14th of October 2010 was a very special date for the KiWi project: After more than two and a half years of development version 1.0 of the semantic collaborative knowledge management software was published. To celebrate that, the project organized a release party in the planetarium in Vienna, Austria. It was a fine evening that featured speeches of Ross Gardler (Vice President Community, Apache Software Foundation) and David Ayers (Free Software Foundation Europe), followed by a demonstration of KiWi by Sebastian Schaffert (KiWi Project Lead).

KiWi, the Open Source development platform for building Semantic Social Media Applications, offers features required for Social Media applications such as versioning, (semantic) tagging, rich text editing, easy linking, rating and commenting, as well as advanced “smart” services such as recommendations, rule-based reasoning, information extraction, intelligent search and querying, a sophisticated social reputation system, vocabulary management, and rich visualisation.

To make sure, that KiWi does not die, after the closure of the EC-funded periode, the project makes effort to form a community. The release party was thus also an opportunity to get in touch with the project team. Another opportunity to get in touch with the Software and it’s developers behind is in February next year. When KiWi Snow Camp will gonna be somewhere in the Salzburg mountains.

The KiWi projects sponsors ticktes to participate in the camp for all those

  • which have a good idea on how semantic technologies can make social media hit the target?
  • and are inspired by the possibilities of the KiWi platform?

Together with the KiWi Team participants will meet in February 2011 in Salzburg’s mountains to develop ideas, programm, discuss and develop amazing new pieces of code – and of course enjoy the skiing experience. Not to mention receive the glory of recognition from others in the open source communities and within the broader semantic web community.

How to get my trip to the KiWi Snow Camp?

You will need to register as a participant for the KiWi Developer Challenge. Please email kiwimail@kiwi-community.eu to register your intention to participate in the Challenge; if you are not already registered on KiWi Community site, please do so and include a brief biography.

Visit the KiWi Snow Camp page for more details…


Thomas Schandl

OntoWiki Workshop

by , Category: Software Development, Tools & Software

Days 3 and 4 of the OntoWiki KickOff Meeting in Leipzig were comprised of semantic technologies and OntoWiki development workshops.

Just like the overall organization of the project meeting was very good, so Sebastian Dietzold, Sebastian Hellmann, Michael Martin and Jörg Unbehauen did a real good job at putting the ideas behind key concepts of the semantic web across in several introductory SemWeb presentations. Their talks about various technologies from the semantic web stack like URIs, RDF and its serialisations, RDFS, SPARQL and some related tools were well suited to bring people who are relatively new to the semantic web up to speed. Links to the presentation slides can be found at the project page in the coming days.

Later Jens Lehmann outlined the new things OWL 2 brings, e. g. profiles, which are subsets of OWL 2 and which provide different degrees of expressivity and reasoning efficiency.

The last day started with Sören Auer’s presentation of their semantic wiki OpenResearch, a site where information on conferences, journals and scientists is pooled. OpenResearch is built with Semantic MediaWiki (SMW), just like our Social Semantic Web wiki.

While SMW is a very useful tool as it lowers the entry barriers for using semantic wikis, Sören also pointed out  that in comparison OntoWiki provides some important features that SMW doesn’t have:

  • SMW doesn’t use SPARQL for its queries, but a less powerful custom query language, whereas OntoWiki has full SPARQL support.
  • OntoWiki’s UI has many widgets that support the user when entering data or new properties on a page (e. g. there is an autocomplete feature for suggesting properties)
  • With SMW changes to the wiki’s semantic structure often entail manual changes to many, many pages. With OntoWiki it is easy to e.g. change poperties at any time.

For the new version of OntoWiki Sören and his team use the Zend framework and develop the Erfurt API to store and access RDF data. The Erfurt API supports SPARQL, versioning, caching and RDF based authentification/access control. It abstracts different stores using the adapter pattern, so it can be used with Virtuoso and any other store which has an interface provided by Zend_Db (MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc.) plus they are working on an interface for Redland. Find the slides for Philipp Frischmuth’s Erfurt API presentation here, the API documentation here and Norman Heino’s Zend & OntoWiki Application Framework presentation here.

Julian Jöris demonstrated how Selenium is used for acceptance testing. This is a very promising testing framework for web applications, where one can e.g. record interactions with different browsers and automatically run them as tests. Selenium has a Firefox extension to record macros and is integrated with PHPUnit.

Finally we had a very good discussion about our conX-OntoWiki integration use case and application ideas, so we left Leipzig with a pleasant anticipation of the coming co-operation in the project.

Pascal Hitzler

Semantic MediaWiki In Popular Media

by , Category: Literature & Publications, Tools & Software

Semantic MediaWikiSemantic MediaWiki is being featured in issue 12/2008 of the German popular computer magazine iX in an article about wiki engines. It’s the only semantic wiki among those presented, and although it is an extension of MediaWiki (which underlies Wikipedia) – which is also in the article – it is discussed separately and thus receives quite some emphasis in the article. iX has featured Semantic MediaWiki before, more precisely in an article dedicated to it in 11/2007. It’s well-deserved, I think, considering the many sites which use Semantic MediaWiki.

It’s good to see that the visibility of Semantic Web is also growing outside academia and involved industry.

Author: Pascal Hitzler

Thomas Schandl

Short Semantic MediaWiki Tutorial (with link to sandbox)

by , Category: Conferences & Events, Knowledge Management, Linked Data & Open Data, Social Software, Tools & Software, Videos & Tutorials

On the occasion of the recent publication of our book, Social Semantic Web, we have created an accompanying wiki for you to explore the contents of the book and obtain information about its authors. Staying true to the motto “Eat your own dog food”, the Semantic Web Company has used a semantic wiki for that purpose.

We opted for Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) and the extensions Semantic Forms and Semantic Drilldown. In this blog post we’ll take a look at the handy features you get with these. This short tutorial is based on my SMW demonstration at the Web of Data Practitioners’ Days in Vienna two weeks ago.

As the book is in German, the wiki is set up in German, too, but that shouldn’t be a problem for understanding the demonstrated features. For the following examples, we have created a mirror of our productive wiki, so don’t hesitate to edit and play with this mirror wiki (we might refresh it occasionally, so don’t write any data into the wiki that you don’t also have stored elsewhere). This tutorial is going to take you through the following SMW features:

  • Automatically created lists
  • Faceted search
  • Semantic queries
  • Entering data via forms
  • RDF export

So let’s see what these features hold for us.

  • Automatically created lists

A common problem in wikis like Wikipedia is the (amount of) effort it requires to create and maintain various lists like the list of the EU’s largest cities. It’s an equally laborious and error-prone activity to keep such lists up to date; as a result, there are a lot of useful Wikipedia lists we can imagine that don’t exist at all, like a list of the world’s largest corporations with a CEO younger than 35.

In SMW it is easy to create all kinds of lists with queries. This page for the book’s table of contents is an example. View its source to see the inline queries used to generate the page (click to enlarge or view the source on the wiki):

Semantic Media Wiki Query

As a result, the list is generated afresh any time the table of contents page is called up. If the data on an article’s page has changed, it will also be updated in that list – while in regular MediaWikis one has to manually update the data in both places (the article, and the list), which, apart from the extra work, also makes errors and inconsistencies much more likely.

  • Faceted search

Take at look at the list of articles page… Continue reading →