From: Yaron K. <ya...@gm...> - 2009-09-01 05:08:54
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Hi everyone, I've only recently gotten back from Wikimania in Buenos Aires, still exhausted after an overload of information, conversation, travel and alcoholic drinks. :) It was an intense experience, with not enough time for all the discussions I wanted to have with people, but still quite a lot of conversing and socializing. I wanted to summarize here the Semantic MediaWiki-related aspects of the conference; and there were quite a lot this year. First of all, the people: Markus and Denny were there, [1] as were some other people who have been involved with the SMW community, like Patrick Sbrzesny; plus representatives from two somewhat related projects, DBpedia and Freebase. On "hacking day" (the day before Wikimania), Markus worked on inverse-property querying, which he then released the next day (you probably saw his email about it). At the same time, Markus, Denny and I came up with what we think is a reasonable approach to the interface for "version 2.0" of the Special:Ask page; I'll probably send out a separate email about that. I got to hang out quite a bit with Markus and Denny throughout the conference, which is always a treat for me. And I got to see Markus' new Semantic Web book! [2] Second, the SMW-related presentations: I made a presentation called "Using external data in MediaWiki", [3] which focused on the External Data extension but also briefly covered other extensions for viewing videos, RSS feeds, etc. Near the end of the talk there was a funny moment when Markus pointed out a security leak in External Data that I hadn't thought of (there's a way to find out "secret" API keys). To his credit, he also suggested a solution - it'll be there in the next version. :) The next day, Markus, Denny and I made a panel presentation about Semantic MediaWiki (no video up yet). It was a bit of a "scattershot" presentation: Denny gave an overview of SMW and its benefits; then Markus talked about changes to SMW since the last Wikimania, and I briefly listed the new SMW-based or -inspired extensions since the last Wikimania (External Data, Semantic Compound Queries, Semantic Maps and Semantic Internal Objects). Third, general discussions about SMW: there was a lot of interest in Semantic MediaWiki this year. Brion Vibber and fellow Wikimedia developer Daniel Kinzler were discussing concrete plans with Markus and Denny to start testing SMW in some special Wikipedia environment, after lots of theoretical discussions about it over the last year. My understanding is that the current plan is to start testing sometime in the next three or four months. The interesting thing is, I had always assumed that getting SMW onto Wikipedia would be a first step toward possibly getting some of the related extensions, like Semantic Forms and the rest, onto Wikipedia eventually; say, a few years later. But, based on some discussions at Wikimania, it appears that, due to the timing of various projects, it's quite possible that one or more of the spinoff extensions will get onto Wikipedia first. Namely: - there's a project in place to get maps onto Wikipedia articles, replacing the current static images (for pages that even have those) with dynamic maps that use the OpenLayers application and OpenStreetMap mapping service. You can see the Wikimania video about it here. [4] The front-end interface is the part that they've devoted the least amount of time to, and so there's a good chance that they'll end up using the Maps extension for it instead; Maps, as you probably know, was created by Jeroen De Dauw during the Google Summer of Code, to serve as a complement to the Semantic Maps extension. It would certainly be good for the SMW project, I think, to have a core part of SMW's mapping already in place on Wikipedia. I think it helps that the head of the project, Ævar (rhymes with "my var") Bjarmason, is an easy-going guy; we and a few other people ended up motorcycling in Uruguay together the day after Wikimania. - as mentioned, I gave a talk about the External Data extension; afterwards, Daniel K. and a few other Wikimedia developers approached me about its possible use on Wikipedia for various specific purposes they've already been trying to find solutions for; we'll see what comes of that. - finally, the Wikipedia Usability Initiative, [5] which has already released a new MediaWiki skin, is looking now into making template calls easier to edit: which is where Semantic Forms would come in. You can see the talk by Naoko Komura, the head of the usability initiative, here; [6] Semantic Forms is mentioned several times. I talked with Naoko privately about various possibilities: she thinks both SF and SMW are great, but they want a solution for template-call editing in place well before any real "go-ahead" can probably be given on SMW. I have a few ideas about how to create a forms-without-SMW solution; I'll probably send out a separate, detailed email about that at some point soon. (And discussions with the usability people will probably continue as well.) - I should also mention that DBpedia, which is a non-Wikimedia project to create a queriable database of Wikipedia's information, could end up using either Maps or Semantic Maps or both, in their initiative to display geographic information. Christian Becker mentioned Semantic Maps in his talk on DBpedia's use of geodata, [7] and I later talked to him about it personally. So all that was very exciting; my guess is that, given all these various initiatives, chances are good that at least something SMW-related will show up on Wikipedia before too long. This increased awareness of, and interest in, the greater SMW system tied in to something I noticed about Wikimania, which is that the talks seemed more technical and less "community-oriented" than they had been at previous Wikimanias. Of course, I wasn't getting the full picture, since I usually only attend technical talks when possible, but there seemed to be a good deal more options to choose from this year. Besides SMW, there were talks about accessing Wikipedia articles in offline form, in printed form, in audio form, on mobile devices, in queriable form (via DBpedia), and through Google Wave; plus various discussions about developer bots and tools, and interface issues. Contrast this with the first Wikimania I attended, Boston in 2006, when the majority of talks were on things like managing collaboration and issues of trust. [8] Personally, I think this reflects a natural shift, as Wikipedia becomes a mature website, from questions of "how do we organize our community?" to "how can we make our data as easy to access and edit as possible?" So that covers the SMW side of things at Wikimania; which is of course only a small percentage of everything that happened. I hope to write more about the rest on my blog at some point, but I'd encourage everyone to check out all the videos from the conference, [9] and to read about it on Twitter, Google blog search, etc. -Yaron [1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/wikimania2009/3860587867/ [2] http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Semantic-Technologies-Textbooks-Computing/dp/142009050X [3] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:200908271403-Yaron_Koren-Using_external_data_in_MediaWiki.ogg [4] http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:200908271206-Bjarmason-Open_StreetMap_integration_into_Wikimedia_projects.ogg [5] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:200908271140-Christian_Becker-Linked_Geodata.ogg [6] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page [7] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:200908271557-Naoko_Komura-Wikipedia_Usability_Initiative.ogg [8] http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schedule [9] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimania_2009_presentations |