#Ask and it will be #given to you

Reading about Ask 1.0 is like getting the sensation of falling through a rabbit hole and ending up in Wonderland. You read that it is the query language that is already used by Semantic MediaWiki, it allows for the creation of lists of any item in a Wikipedia article.

Semantic MediaWiki was great but this, this allows for the use of Wikidata !! It is written by the developers of Wikidata!!

Please can we have it... like yesterday ???

PLEASE

Thanks,
       Alice

#Localisation for your language on one map

At #translatewiki.net we are experimenting with Semantic MediaWiki. One of the features is the use of maps. We have implemented this for the language portals; in this way people can see where the localisers for a language can be found like in the example below for Hindi.

As you can see, only two of the localisers for Hindi entered their location on their user page. It shows how we change things, we include a new mechanism or thingie and, as it gains appreciation the data shown becomes more inclusive.

One challenge I am now facing is how to have a map with the people who completed their 500 localisations for the rally.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Digitizing a #Malayalam #dictionary

Digitizing a Malayalam book is quite different from digitizing an English book. For an English book you use OCR and move straight on to the proofreading and formatting of the text.

It becomes even more interesting when the text is rich in all kinds of annotations like in this dictionary. It is the the first Malayalam-English-Malayalam Dictionary by Dr Herman Gundert. There are all kinds of opportunities here, ehm problems.

There is no OCR for Malayalam yet so it has to be crowd sourced. The annotations are cryptic and make only sense in a dead tree dictionary. When you digitize such a text and it remains a flat text and consequently it is extremely hard to use the public domain content elsewhere; in OmegaWiki or in Wiktionary for instance.

Santhosh is experimenting with Semantic MediaWiki . It will allow for exportable information and, that will make the data gained much more useful.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#translatewiki.net does #Semantic #MediaWiki

When you look at the bottom of any page of translatewiki.net, it says "Powered by Semantic MediaWiki". It means that not only is translatewiki.net where you can localise Semantic MediaWiki, it is also a place where semantic web approaches can be used in earnest.

As translatewiki.net is a production environment, I do not feel comfortable to start experimenting wildly. It is however one of the more visible and strategic places for Semantic MediaWiki to pop up.

It is the closest you get to the real thing; implementation on Wikipedia itself. So my obvious question is: what should we do semantically on translatewiki. Who will provide us with the ideas that will show off the brilliant functionality that has now become a possibility?
Thanks,
      GerardM

OpenStreetMap

One of the major parts of the codeathon of Wikimania 2009 was the OpenStreetMap (OSM) integration into the Wikimedia Foundation projects. When Wikipedia is to use OSM, there will be a big demand for its data so much of the work is about infrastructure and scalability.

As many of the people involved come to a Wikimania, it was great to learn how Slippymap and Semantic Maps relate. It turns out that the bulk of the work done is applicable to either extension and, that Semantic Maps brings together other map functionality.

The joy of having people together is that Aevar discussed with Siebrand the possibilities of localising OpenStreetMap at translatewiki.net. One of the arguments in favour is that OpenLayers is already localised at translatewiki. This is now being discussed by the OSM developers, there are issues that will need to be resolved, but the arguments are sound.

With Wikimedia projects using the OpenStreetMap data, it is obvious to me that our localiser community will be happy to make OpenStreetMap even more awesome.
Thanks.
GerardM

Inaugural meeting of the Concept Web Alliance

The Concept Web Alliance (CWA) is a new organisation that aims to bring the best science has to offer together and make better science and be more informative about science.

The key to the activities of the CWA is the realisation that there is an overwhelming amount of data around, data that is available in many formats. Data that could be of use in many environments and data that would be of use when there are commonalities for the data between these different environments.

Semantic web, triples, disambiguation, authentication, death switches, multi linguality, community involvement, Wikipedia were just a few of the subjects that had my interest among the many, many subjects that were mentioned / discussed.

What made this meeting so powerful was the presence of so many influential people representing from so many countries, organisations, domains.

I had the pleasure to present a demonstration project that demonstrated how XML data can be imported in an integrated text-data environment with Semantic MediaWiki and how the data can then be exported as triples..

Wikidraft

View more presentations from Gerard Meijssen.

Referata in anything but English

I am in New York and I am meeting Yaron Koren. Yaron is one of the Semantic MediaWiki greats and he is the man behind the referata.com websites. I consider the referata websites "best of breed" and I am a fan of the Food finds wiki. Food finds is about finding restaurants all over the world.

When you are getting information from all over the world, it makes sense to use a "universal language" and as such it can be argued that English qualifies. This does not mean that there is no room for Semantic MediaWikis in other languages. Yaron told me that he was impressed by the large amount of localisations that came his way when all his extensions became supported at translatewiki.net.

My challenge is to have a best of breed Semantic MediaWiki in another language, any other language. But would it not be great when this language was something "exotic" like Arabic, Tagalog or Gujarati. I am not suggesting that Semantic MediaWiki is completely localised in those languages, but they can be.

Would this not be cool ?
Thanks,
       GerardM

Task Tracking with Semantic MediaWiki

I blogged about the first day of an extension new to WMV Subversion that was localised at translationwiki.net. I found a presentation about Semantic Tasks from a year ago. It is staggering to find all these gems that make MediaWiki an insanely great platform.

Thanks,
GerardM

Task Tracking with Semantic MediaWiki

View more presentations from nyergler.

Google Summer Of Code

Four MediaWiki projects have been accepted in the Google Summer Of Code. Congratulations to the four students and their mentors.
Thanks,
       GerardM

When you query geo data, you want a geo data result

I have been asked to review proposed talks at Wikimania. One talk was about Semantic MediaWiki and the other about Open Street Map. Both are great subjects for a MediaWiki conference because both add important functionality to MediaWiki.

When you think about it, it would be really cool when the results of a SMW query that results in geo data is presented in a map. At the moment there are two extensions to SMW that do just that; Semantic Layers and Google Geocoder.

Given that much of the primary functionality can be found in either extension, it should be possible to come up with something that would work for Open Street Map. Having support for both SMW and OSM would present a paradigm shift; it would make it easy to mesh Wikipedia in the big data world.
Thanks,
      GerardM

ar, de, dsb, fr, gl, gsw, hsb, ia, ja, ksh, lb, nl, oc, pl

A new extension "Semantic Tasks" became available. Now twenty four hours later, the localisation for fourteen languages has already been completed. In my opinion that is quite special.

Another thing I appreciate is that Semantic Tasks installs nicely in the Wikiation Extension Testing Environment. This is special for me because it is the first Semantic MediaWiki extension that just installs.

Semantic Tasks was developed for the CcTeamSpace is the internal task and project tracking system used at Creative Commons. All these things I learned today and in my opinion all this really demonstrates the relevance and the quality of the MediaWiki ecosystem.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Appreciating Semantic MediaWiki

I am spending a considerable amount of time working on the "Wikiation Extension Testing Environment" (WETE). This is software that is designed to test MediaWiki and its extensions in many configurations. Wikiation is a Dutch company that provides hosting and value added services in the Dutch language and with MediaWik as its platform. It is of extreme importance for Wikiation that the software just works. The customers of Wikiation rely on a quality service, they expect that the systems are running.

One of the customers of Wikiation is interested in Semantic MediaWiki. Installing SMW is complicated, there are many extensions, these extensions have their prerequisites and it is easy to get it wrong. All of SMW is under constant development and consequently the latest is not necessarily the greatest.

As I am working together with Wikiation to develop WETE, SMW is an obvious target to test. I blogged about the lessons learned and several people got into contact with me. I learned that SMW is used for a wide variety of topics, it is used for genomics and for chicks, it is used for contact information and for a science fiction MMO... There is even a hosting company who specialises in SMW.

What SMW helped me to appreciate even more is the great number of people and organisations that have their MediaWiki installation. SMW is great software and it deserves the best support. I am happy that WETE is starting to play a part in this.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Domesday scenario

How do you call a project with over a million people collaborating on information about their country. A project that came to a successful end. A project with many units sold? A success.

What do you call the same project when twenty one years later only two working systems are left ?

The Domesday project is very much a project of its day and as a generation of British school children were involved, it has had a lot of attention to make the data available again.

There are lessons to be learned. Some of them seem to be obvious in our open content world. They seem to be obvious because we insist on Open Source and the use of licenses that are considered to be "free". There is however more to it. There are also the standards underlying the data. The basic standard we use is text, text expressed in Unicode. This standard is not perfect because some of the languages supported in the WMF do have characters not yet supported in Unicode.

In this text we often express information in a structured way. As long as it is seen as HTML, I can read it. When I look at the Wiki syntax I am lost. When people datamine Wikipedia, special software is written to parse these infoboxes and tables. The result is DBpedia and the DBpedia community does a great job.

The point is that it does not have to be this way. Were we to adopt Semantic MediaWiki for Wikipedia, we would adopt Open Standards that enable us to present our data in a way that is understood by other computers. This will help us achieve our goal of providing information to people because our data will be used to provide a better understanding. In this way we open up our data in a way that was not possible at the time when either of the Domesday books were written. We would open up our data and make it truly free because we make it available for innovative applications.
Thanks,
GerardM

Usability.wikimedia.org

There is a wiki for the Wikipedia Usability Initiative and it has one nice surprise; it uses the Liquid Threads extension for its talk pages.I have started two threads on my user page and I find the way it feeds into the recent changes really intriguing.

The Liquid Threads provide a paradigm shift away from the current talk pages and, I do welcome having more control over the discussions. With the implementation of LQT in the Usability wiki, I think there is no need to have a separate implementation in the labs environment.

I wonder what it takes for a labs implementation to happen. Brion indicated in his FOSDEM presentation, that Semantic MediaWiki is a mature technology, I would welcome a labs implementation. I would love to learn what the procedure is for getting one.
Thanks,
GerardM

Usability - Semantic Forms at Chickipedia

A friend of mine had me look at Chickipedia. I must say that I was impressed with the way MediaWiki was made to look good.. In this website they use Semantic MediaWiki and Semantic forms. I am impressed because it hides a lot of hard stuff from the users.

It looks as good as the Wikia info boxes. What I would welcome are demonstration wikis where all the competing approaches to usability can be shown. When we test the extensions, when we ensure great documentation, we can package all these approaches so that all organisations can make up their mind of the state of the MediaWiki opportunities.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Semantic MediaWiki update

Yesterday I posted that Semantic MediaWiki is now supported by Betawiki. Today already five languages have been completely localised. They are:

• French
• Dutch
• Norwegian (bokmål)‬
• Occitan
• Slovak

Six other language now have a better then 90% localisation and twelve languages have some localisation. It is funny that German and Croat do not have a complete localisation :)

I will agree that I would LOVE to see an experiment with SMW on a Wikipedia...
Thanks,
GerardM

Semantic MediaWiki meets Betawiki

The picture says it all; Semantic MediaWiki is now supported by Betawiki. For you who do not know Semantic MediaWiki, it is one of the more brilliant pieces of software to extend MediaWiki. With Semantic MediaWiki enabled, you get one new instruction :: and it is provides really powerful possibilities to your wiki. What Semantic MediaWiki offers is the ability to provide structure to the information in a page. When you write on the Queen Beatrix article somewhere in the text [[mother::Queen Juliana]], it will allow you to query the information on the Queen Juliana page. This is the basis for the many cool things that Semantic MediaWiki can bring to Wikipedia.

The one thing that makes me really happy how quickly all this was done; Markus Krötzsch replied to a message on the Wikitech-l and stated that localisation was indeed something that has a high priority for him. Siebrand provided him with some pointers about Betawiki, and the same evening these two fine gentlemen had made the necessary changes to the SMW software and its messages and had it imported in Betawiki.

With the localisation issue dealt with, I think that Semantic MediaWiki has done most if not all the major work that was needed when it was last presented at Wikimania. Its performance has been dramatically improved, the number of instructions has been reduced to one, it provides loads of extensions of its own and last but not least many of the functionalities of SMW can be turned on or off.

It does not make sense to write new software when software exists that has been developed over a long time that WORKS.. I hope the Wikimedia Foundation will enable Semantic MediaWiki soon in one project to learn that it can be trusted in all its projects.
Thanks,
GerardM