This is a followup to my short review of Semantic MediaWiki.
I’ve followed the semantic wiki space for quite a while. In late 2003 and early 2004, I was working on my own semantic wiki implementation in PHP, based on the Tavi engine and RAP. That was even before Platypus, the grandfather of all semantic wikis, was released. Sadly, my project never went anywhere.
I’ve tried most of the new projects that have appeared since. Some are quite cool demonstrations of technology (e.g. David Aumüller’s WikSAR), but I usually left wondering: Who will use this? What is it good for? Will it be useful for an audience beyond bored RDF hackers?
Semantic MediaWiki comes closest to this goal. The semantic parts are nicely integrated with the main wiki functionality. They augment rather than dominating the user experience. This avoids this in-your-face nerd toy appeal of most projects. Also, the vision is somewhat different from most older projects (including my own), which usually fall into one of these categories:
- collaborative, web-based unstructured database,
- collaborative, web-based RDF editor,
- wiki with semantic page metadata.
Semantic MediaWiki is focused on being an improvement to Wikipedia where bits of markup can be used to capture some of the semantics of the already written vast body of human-readable knowledge for machine processing. Now it seems to me as if this is a much more realistic application of the semantic wiki idea than any of the above.
Sometimes different people in different places have the same idea without knowing each others. When it happens it means that it can be a good idea.
Ward Cunningham defines wikis as “The simplest online database that could possibly work”. On the other side the Semantic Web “provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries”.
Both are speaking about data. The idea of Semantic Wiki simply joins the two visions.
Anyway, thanks for “Platypus, the grandfather of all semantic wikis”. :-)