From: Yaron K. <ya...@gm...> - 2008-09-03 21:59:12
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Hi everyone, These are the contents of an email I sent a little over a month ago to the Semantic Forms mailing list, detailing my experiences at Wikimania in mid-July; a few people said recently that I should send this to the SMW users mailing list as well. So, here it is, with just a few changes and updates: ---------------------- Well, I'm finally back from the Wikimania conference in Alexandria. I had a great time: I met a lot of interesting people, saw some very informative talks, gave a talk of my own, and got to discuss SMW-related issues with various people. And of course, there was Egypt, a fascinating country I'd never been to before. I'll reserve this email for just observations related to Semantic Forms and Semantic MediaWiki. First of all, there was my own talk, titled "Creating the structured semantic wiki", which I thought went well. It came on the third day of the conference, and was placed right after the SMW talk by Markus (that one was originally structured as a panel featuring Markus, Denny and me, but it became a more standard description-of-SMW presentation, which was most likely for the best, given the general lack of knowledge about the extension). The two presentations somewhat merged into one, with overlapping topics and many people staying to hear both. Thanks to a fantastic setup at the Library of Alexandria, all the talks at the conference were videotaped. In theory, you can see the two videos here: http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/The_state_of_Semantic_MediaWiki http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/Creating_the_structured_semantic_wiki ...although it appears that only the second video (my talk) has actually been uploaded. The first five minutes of that video, though, are the end of the Q&A for the previous talk, so you can get a sense of what that one was like. Also, you can see here a photo from that first talk: http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Image:SMW-at-Wikimania2008.jpg The room was filled to capacity, and then some, for Markus' talk. There were a few high-level Wikimedia people there, which may or may not have meant something; less for my talk, partly, I think, because I was competing with a presentation by Florence Devouard, who was about to end her tenure as Wikimedia Foundation president. One person who did stay for my talk was Angela Beesley, who has connections to both Wikia, the wiki-hosting company, and Wikimedia; afterwards, she asked me about Referata, the hosting site I run, which I had mentioned at the end, and how I viewed it vis-a-vis Wikia (Wikia now offers support for SMW, though not for any of the other semantic extensions). I told her that I don't view the two as competitors, since Wikia is intended for general-use, large-scale encyclopedias, while Referata is intended more for directories and corporate usage, and I encouraged her to add support for SF and the other semantic extensions to Wikia, and also to put in a good word for doing the same thing on Wikipedia itself. We'll see if anything comes out of either of those [editor's note: nothing so far]. The conference was also memorable for its cultural exchange with the people of Egypt and the Arab world, who made up a large number of participants; one interesting anecdote was that, of all the questions I was asked after my presentation, the one I thought was most insightful was posed by a female Egyptian student, wearing a headscarf; she asked whether it was a problem that things are referred to by name in the system, and thus that having different values with the same name would lead to bad data. "Er, yes, that's definitely a problem," I responded. I noted that there were a few potential solutions to it, and said that if I'd created a slide title "Drawbacks of semantic wikis" (there was one titled "Benefits of semantic wikis"), that certainly would have appeared on the list. Anyway, it was an interesting experience. Earlier, there was a very informative talk by Brion Vibber, head MediaWiki developer, entitled "State of the MediaWiki". Among other things, Brion listed changes that were coming to MW and Wikipedia. Among the additions that he discussed were a new extension, called "CommentPages", that will allow for standard blog-style comment pages (some people have asked before about SF being used for such a purpose); improvements to the LiquidThreads discussion extension (same); and, maybe most relevant to SF, an dimprovement to MW's file-uploading capability to make it more user-friendly, including allowing uploading of multiple files at the same time. He also said that he didn't think WYSIWYG editing was coming any time soon to Wikipedia, because he didn't think any of the existing solutions were adequate for handling templates and other complex structures. During the Q&A session I asked Brion if, were he to start developing MediaWiki today from scratch, he would still use PHP. He said yes, which I found reassuring, and gave an explanation I found convincing, which amounted to (a) it makes it easy for people to run MediaWiki on their own servers, and (b) "it works" (i.e., don't fix it if it's not broken). After the talk, a few people came up to Brion to ask some further questions, and Markus was among them, making the case for including SMW on Wikipedia; and asking for a clearer protocol for the evaluation of extensions to be used on Wikipedia. Brion, in his usual Buddha-like way, nodded and gave a somewhat noncomittal answer to both... alas. I also met, and saw the presentation by, Michael Dale, who created the MetaVid extension, and runs MetaVidWiki (metvid.ucsc.edu/wiki), the wiki that uses it. MetaVid stores second-by-second information about online videos, including transcripts of what's being said, and it actually uses SMW to store that information, which I hadn't fully realized before (as I told Michael, it confuses us when there's no "Semantic" at the beginning of the extension name). He said that there was a chance that MetaVidWiki would switch over to using SF for entering semantic information, instead of having users type in SMW's property tags directly. He's also working on a project that he's getting funded by the Wikimedia Foundation to do, which also involves Kaltura, a company that creates software for online video editing. Basically, I think the idea is to create a single MediaWiki extension that lets users edit and annotate a video (in the open-source OGG format) entirely through the wiki; and then eventually get this extension onto Wikipedia. I asked Michael if this extension could be a "Trojan horse" for getting SMW onto Wikipedia, but he wasn't sure what the technical details would be. The founders of Kaltura were also there at the conference, and I talked briefly to one of them, who said that they might have interest themselves in using the semantic extensions. We'll see what comes of that [editor's note: I'm actually talking to them a little bit at the moment]. There was a very interesting talk by Gerard Meijssen, the creator of an extension called OmegaWiki, which allows for the translation of text phrases within a wiki, using an interface similar to the one used by BetaWiki for the translation of phrases used by extensions. The idea of internationalizing SMW-based wikis, to show the same set of data across many different languages, has been brought up before, and this could be a good fit for that kind of approach. I also met and talked with Merrick Schaefer, who works at UNICEF and runs a project called UNIWIKI, which includes both technical and non-technical aspects, but the technical part is a set of patches and extensions to MediaWiki that are meant to improve the user interface in order to make it easier to add pages and view the full set of information; you can see an example at x.mepemepe.com/index.php/Special:CreatePage . They take a non-semantic approach, but it could be that the two projects can learn from each other as far as making user-friendly interfaces. I also saw a presentation by Mikel Maron about OpenStreetMap, a project to create freely-available street maps of the entire world using MediaWiki. He noted some problems with regular web street maps, like Google's, that OSM seeks to overcome: they're slow to update to changes in the real world, you can't reuse their data without a license, and they're often not cheap to use. OSM seems like a natural fit for street mapping with the Semantic Layers extension, and the only drawback appears to be that their set of data is currently very spotty outside of Europe, the U.K. and the U.S. Finally, I had a number of conversations with Markus and Denny outside of the two presentations; this conference was the first time we had talked in person about SMW development, so we had a lot to go over. There were two relevant things we talked about: the first was that I brought up the issue of SMW supporting what I call "true n-ary relations", meaning properties that offer complete flexibility in setting the number, type and layout of their sub-properties (see http://semanticweb.org/wiki/N-ary_relations for much more on this). N-ary relations are relevant to SF for basically any data that's represented using multiple-instance templates. I think I convinced Markus and Denny to a greater degree of the usefulness of such a feature, although the implementation is still yet to be decided, and they said they didn't have time to add such a thing themselves. The second issue was the bundling of SMW and the related extensions into a single package. At some point last year, there was discussion of adding SF and possibly some other extensions into SMW itself: now the movement is in the other direction, to make each extension as small as possible in order to increase modularity (again, with the goal of being added to Wikipedia and other large wikis in mind). In fact, some components of SMW might themselves get spun off into separate extensions, like the timeline feature (and possibly any n-ary relations support that gets added). However, at the same time there's a desire to bundle all these extensions into a single package, for easier download, and to synchronize releases to a greater degree. Right now the plan is to use the "SMW+" project (http://wiki.ontoprise.de/ontoprisewiki/index.php/SMW%2B_-_Business_Ready_Semantic_Collaboration) for this purpose: it's a package created by Ontoprise (makers of the Halo extension) that already holds a number of extensions (including Halo, of course), and can have more added to it. This is pending the fixing of Halo to work with the current version of SMW and be easier to install and uninstall, which Markus and Denny are now being paid to do. -------------------------- ...and speaking of those two, I just uploaded this photo: http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Image:Markus_and_Denny.jpg -Yaron |