Re: [Semediawiki-user] Is SMW a Semantic Web tool?

[CW D. <cwd...@gm...>]

No doubt, SMW is much, much more than just a semantic web tool.  It's also a
tool for developing ontologies and mixing/merging existing vocabularies; a
collaborative database (and database front-end, which is important); and a
portal to the semantic web.

"Collaborative data" is what sells my bosses on SMW's utility in our office.
(Of course, our office--Joint Data Support--is all about data, so I tend to
play that angle up a bit!)  SMW is also valuable for the  manifold ways it
can present data: tables, csv export, timelines, graphs, maps, RDF, etc.
Then again, the utility of the semantic web is eactly that: a web page
becomes more than a page.  It's a source of data in a page.

-Clarence


On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 1:20 AM, Yaron Koren <ya...@gm...> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On the front page of semantic-mediawiki.org, it states:
>
> "Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is a free extension of MediaWiki – the
> wiki-system powering Wikipedia – that helps to search, organise, tag,
> browse, evaluate, and share the wiki's content. While traditional wikis
> contain only texts which computers can neither understand nor evaluate, SMW
> adds semantic annotations that bring the power of the Semantic Web to the
> wiki."
>
> I was looking at this, and was tempted to re-write the last part to
> something like, "that allow a wiki to function as a collaborative database",
> because I thought that gave a clearer idea of what SMW actually does; but
> then I thought this was part of a broader question that maybe deserved
> general discussion. The question is: how tied in is Semantic MediaWiki with
> the Semantic Web? Is SMW basically just an offshoot of the Semantic Web (as
> the intro has it), or is the Semantic Web, in the form of RDF export and the
> like, a minor, disposable part of SMW? Or is it somewhere in between? I tend
> to think that SMW and the Semantic Web, though both important, are
> basically independent concepts; though I might be in the minority on that
> one.
>
> There's also the somewhat-independent question of how SMW should be
> marketed. Does it bolster SMW to associate it with the Semantic Web, or does
> that just confuse people and/or make them think SMW is basically an academic
> exercise? Obviously the answer depends a lot on whom you're marketing to,
> but what about cases like the SMW homepage, where you have to have one set
> of wording for everybody?
>
> -Yaron
>
>
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