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Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an extension to
MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWik ...
that allows for annotating semantic data within wiki pages, thus turning a wiki that incorporates the extension into a
semantic wiki A semantic wiki is a wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages. Regular, or syntactic, wikis have structured text and untyped hyperlinks. Semantic wikis, on the other hand, provide the ability to capture or identif ...
. Data that has been
encoded In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...
can be used in
semantic search Semantic search denotes search with meaning, as distinguished from lexical search where the search engine looks for literal matches of the query words or variants of them, without understanding the overall meaning of the query. Semantic search seek ...
es, used for aggregation of pages, displayed in formats like maps,
calendar A calendar is a system of organizing days. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months and years. A date is the designation of a single and specific day within such a system. A calendar is also a physi ...
s and graphs, and exported to the outside world via formats like RDF and CSV.


Authors

Semantic MediaWiki was initially created by Markus Krötzsch, Denny Vrandečić and Max Völkel, and was first released in 2005. Its development was initially funded by the EU-funded FP6 project SEKT (CORDIS site), and was later supported in part by Institute AIFB of the University of Karlsruhe (later renamed the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). Currently James Hong Kong is the lead developer , while the other core developer is Jeroen De Dauw.


Basic syntax

Every semantic annotation within SMW is a "property" connecting the page on which it resides to some other piece of data, either another page or a data value of some type, using triples of the form "subject, predicate, object". As an example, a page about Germany could have, encoded within it, the fact its capital city is Berlin. On the page "Germany", the syntax would be: ... the capital city is Has capital::Berlin ... which is semantically equivalent to the statement "Germany" "Has capital" "Berlin". In this example the "Germany" page is the ''subject'', "Has capital" is the ''predicate'', and "Berlin" is the ''object'' that the semantic link is pointing to. However, the much more common way of storing data within Semantic MediaWiki is via MediaWiki templates which themselves contain the necessary SMW markup. For this example, the "Germany" page could contain a call to a template called "Country", that looked like this: The "Country" template would handle storing whatever the value of the parameter "Capital" is, using the property "Has capital". The template would also handle the display of the data. Semantic MediaWiki developers have estimated that 99% of SMW data is stored in this way. Semantic MediaWiki also has its own inline querying tools. For instance, if pages about countries stored additional information like population data, a query could be added to a page that displays a list of all countries with a population greater than 50 million, along with their capital city; and Germany would appear in such a list, with Berlin alongside it.


Usage

Semantic MediaWiki is in use on over 1,600 public active wikis around the world, in addition to an unknown number of private wikis. Notable public wikis that use SMW include the Metacafe wiki,
Web Platform The Web platform is a collection of technologies developed as open standards by the World Wide Web Consortium and other standardization bodies such as the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, the Unicode Consortium, the Internet Engin ...
, SNPedia, SKYbrary, Metavid, Familypedia,
OpenEI Open Energy Information (OpenEI) is a website for policy makers, researchers, technology investors, venture capitalists, and market professionals with energy data, information, analyses, tools, images, maps, and other resources. It was establ ...
, the
Libreplanet LibrePlanet (literally, "Free Planet") is a community project created and supported by the Free Software Foundation. Its objective is the promotion of free software around the world by bringing every year an international conference to local comm ...
wiki, the Free Software Directory and
translatewiki.net translatewiki.net, formerly named Betawiki, is a web-based translation platform powered by the Translate extension for MediaWiki. It can be used to translate various kinds of texts but is commonly used for creating localisations for software ...
. Organizations that use SMW internally include Pfizer,
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Harvard Pilgrim Health Care is a non-profit health services company based in Canton, Massachusetts serving the New England region of the United States. On August 14, 2019, the boards of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and Tufts Health Plan announced ...
,
Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development (J&JPRD) is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson that is responsible for discovering and developing pharmaceutical drugs. J&JPRD has research sites located in Raritan, New Jersey, Titusville ...
, the
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is one of the United States Department of Energy national laboratories, managed by the United States Department of Energy, Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science. The main campus of the labor ...
, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NATO and the
U.S. Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national secur ...
. SMW has notably gained traction in the health care domain for collaboratively creating bio-medical terminologies and ontologies. Examples are LexWiki, which is jointly run by the
Mayo Clinic The Mayo Clinic () is a nonprofit American academic medical center focused on integrated health care, education, and research. It employs over 4,500 physicians and scientists, along with another 58,400 administrative and allied health staff, ...
, National Cancer Institute, World Health Organization and Stanford University; and Neuroscience Information Framework's
NeuroLex NeuroLex is a lexicon of neuroscience concepts. It is a structured as a semantic wiki, using Semantic MediaWiki. NeuroLex is supported by the Neuroscience Information Framework project. Overview The NeuroLex is intended to help improve the wa ...
. Semantic MediaWiki is also supported on the wiki farm Referata, by default. Wikia has previously activated Semantic MediaWiki on user request, but has stopped doing so since upgrading to version 1.19 of MediaWiki; Wikia sites, such as Familypedia, that had started using it are able to continue.


Semantic MediaWiki and Wikidata

Some members of the
academic community An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, ...
began urging the use of SMW on Wikipedia since it was first proposed. In a 2006 paper, Max Völkel ''et al.'' wrote that in spite of Wikipedia's utility, "its contents are barely machine-interpretable. Structural knowledge, e.g. about how concepts are interrelated, can neither be formally stated nor automatically processed. Also the wealth of numerical data is only available as plain text and thus can not be processed by its actual meaning." The Wikimedia community began adding semantic microformat markup to Wikipedia in 2007. In 2010,
Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...
Deputy Director
Erik Möller Erik Möller (born 1979) is a German freelance journalist, software developer, author, and former deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), based in San Francisco. Möller additionally works as a web designer and previously managed his ...
stated that Wikimedia was interested in adding semantic capabilities to Wikipedia, but that they were unsure whether Semantic MediaWiki was the right solution, since it was unclear whether it could be used without negatively affecting Wikipedia's performance. In April 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation project Wikidata began, which provides a massive shared database for use in articles of every language in Wikipedia, and other Wikimedia projects. Its content is also freely available to anyone else. Wikidata supplants the potential use of Semantic MediaWiki on Wikipedia, but its software uses Wikibase.


Spinoff extensions

A variety of open-source MediaWiki extensions exist that use the data structure provided by Semantic MediaWiki. Among the most notable are: * Page Forms - enables user-created forms for adding and editing pages that use semantic data * Semantic Result Formats - provides a large number of display formats for semantic data, including charts, graphs, calendars and mathematical functions * Semantic Drilldown - provides a
faceted browser Faceted search is a technique that involves augmenting traditional search techniques with a faceted navigation system, allowing users to narrow down search results by applying multiple filters based on faceted classification of the items. It is som ...
interface for viewing the semantic data in a wiki * Maps - displays geographic semantic data using various mapping services


Community

The official gathering for Semantic MediaWiki developers and users is SMWCon, which has been held twice a year since 2010, in various cities in the United States and Europe. The largest such event, in October 2013 in Berlin, had around 90 attendees. The first virtual SMWCon 2020 attracted 234 attendees.


See also

* DBpedia * Freebase *
OntoWiki OntoWiki is a free and open-source semantic wiki application, meant to serve as an ontology editor and a knowledge acquisition system. It is a web-based application written in PHP and using either a MySQL database or a Virtuoso triple store. Ont ...
* SMW+


References


Further reading


Software could add meaning to 'wiki' links
Matthew Sparkes, '' New Scientist'', June 7, 2006 * Markus Krötzsch, Denny Vrandecic, Max Völkel, Heiko Haller, Rudi Studer
Semantic Wikipedia
Journal of Web Semantics 5/2007, December 2007. *
Struktur fürs Wiki
Rolf Strathewerd, '' Linux-Magazin'', July 2009 * Smart, P. R.; Braines, D.; Bao, J.; Mott, D.; Huynh, T. D.; Shadbolt, N.
Supporting Distributed Coalition Planning with Semantic Wiki Technology
In: 4th Annual Conference of the International Technology Alliance (ACITA'10). * Krabina, Bernhard
The Vienna History Wiki - a Collaborative Knowledge Platform for the City of Vienna
Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym 2015). ACM, 2015.


External links

* {{Semantic Web Semantic wiki software MediaWiki extensions