Semantic Wiki Guide

This wiki runs Semantic Mediawiki - an extension that lets you declare triplet links with the current page as the subject, a Property which serves as the predicate, and an object with a type specified by the property.

Semantic mediawiki lets you declare semantic/triplet links within text with a minor extension to wikilinks like [[Property Name::Object]] with a :: delimiter.

To combine fluid semantic properties with more structured information, we additionally make use of Templates and Forms using the Page Forms and Page Schemas extensions.

Component Summary

As a brief summary of how different parts of the wiki are split across different elements:

• Properties - Define the "meaning" of links between pages or external resources. Each requires a data type (Most commonly another Page, but also text, URLs, dates, and so on), and can be linked to an external vocabulary like schema.org
• Templates - Group together multiple properties, and define how they are displayed on a page.
• Forms - Provide an interface for creating/editing pages by filling the values in (potentially multiple) Templates.
• Categories - Define schemas for categories of objects on the wiki that group together a (single) form, template(s), and schemas.

Worked Example

Typically one would define these from "bottom to top" - defining properties, then templates, and so on, but Page Schemas provides an interface that makes it much easier for doing it "top to bottom" by defining a schema that then can be used to generate the relevant forms, templates, and properties. This order gets messier with longer-lived wikis that then reuse properties and templates across categories, but we'll start with a simplified example of creating Category:Resource

Category/Schema

• Page schemas extension example
• Subcategories
• Relationship between schema and instantiation in subpages via generation and potential subsequent editing. (how 2 use wiki histories)

Forms

• Page forms syntax and the relationship between page schemas and page forms
• Forms with multiple templates
• The relationship between a form and the free text in a page
• How a particular form is indicated by a page.

Templates

• Format/Syntax
• Relationship between display and semantic groupings/categories
• Order of operations from page schemas.
• Relationship to more general mediawiki templates

Properties

• Types
• External Schema Integration

Queries/Displaying Data

• Ask syntax and usage
• inverse property lookup and assignment

References

• SMW Data Types: https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:List_of_datatypes

in progress