[SMW-devel] Virtual Instances

[Jon L. <dat...@gm...>]

It occurs to me that there are often times when you're putting
information on a wiki where you're providing information about a lot
of related items, all on one page.  This happens because while there's
enough semantic information involved to warrant a brief summary about
the item in question, the item isn't important enough to warrant a
page of its own.  An example of this can be found at <
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DC_Multiverse_worlds >.  This
page includes information about over a hundred fictional worlds
mentioned in comic books published by DC Comics; many of these worlds
have only appeared in a single panel of a single comic book, if that;
dedicating an entire page to such a small piece of trivia feels like
overkill.  On the other hand, each world has a designation, an era in
which is was conceived, a sample of inhabitants, some defining
characteristics, and the comic book issue in which it was first
mentioned.  It would be quite useful to be able to annotate these bits
of information; but right now, the only means of doing so is to create
a separate page for each.

So my proposal is this: add a tag which isolates a portion of the page
from the rest of it for the purpose of semantic annotations: that is,
semantic annotations within the tag apply to the item that the tag
represents, rather than to the item that the page as a whole
represents.

I'm probably proposing an extension rather than a revision; but I'm
not sure - I haven't thought this idea through all the way yet.  And
besides, a revision is merely an extension that's made it into the
core. :)

-- 
Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang