[wiki-research] Loaded questions about Semantic Wikis

[Ramirez, Carlos]

MediaWiki does offer a Semantic extension which a allows you to
incorporate FOAF,DOAP,SKOS and other ontologies in wikitext. One can
create MediaWiki templates and forms to help out the user in
automatically generating the markup.

-Carlos

-----Original Message-----
From: Dirk Riehle [mailto:dirk at riehle.org] 
Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2006 4:53 AM
To: Desilets, Alain; wiki-research at wikisym.org
Subject: Re: [wiki-research] Loaded questions about Semantic Wikis


>The hard part (and which, as CS points out seems to be mostly ignored),

>is how to get people to write metadata that will actually lend itself 
>to automatic inference by a machine.

I agree---semantic wikis are missing a killer app that is convincing to
those who are supposed to do the work. I'd love to see Wikipedia
semantified, but who is going to do it and why would they? The benefits
need to be tangible to those who are going to do the work, not some
other party.

>How do you come up with a metadata scheme that is rich enough to be 
>able to describe all the important semantics of a wiki page? How do you

>get people to agree on that when the industry can't even agree on a 
>standard for JavaScript?

That's what I don't worry about. For example, Wikipedia users are
already doing a lot of the semantics stuff using categories. It is
adhoc, chaotic, inefficient. But that's how things have worked before as
well; it is an arduous process, but Wikipedia has proved that
(some) order can emerge from chaos.

Dirk 


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