Comments on: Web 2.1 pre-alpha.

By: Waldir

Waldir — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 16:53:05 +0000

I was going to timidly mention Hakia, but then I tried Nick's query and well, it worked pretty well. What do you think?

By: Thomas Bleher

Thomas Bleher — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:26:49 +0000

This is probably not exactly what you were asking for, but the Semantic MediaWiki-extension is used on many wikis already and greatly extends what is possible with MediaWiki. As a small example, you may look at http://spiele.j-crew.de/wiki/Kategorie:Programme (a wiki I maintain). The page lists all the games in that wiki, together with a short description and some other characteristics. All this automatically created from semantic data. I find this very useful and hope it will one day be enabled on Wikipedia (after the performance has improved).

By: Nick J

Nick J — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:36:54 +0000

The wiki semantic web stuff that I have played with briefly 3 or 4 months ago was kind of flaky and unreliable (e.g. a test show-me-that-it-works query that I knew should return approx 400 results only gave 7, making it 98% broken). Maybe that’s something that could be improved, but after playing with it a bit my primary conclusion was that it just wasn’t useful yet in its current form. As to whether it could potentially be useful, if it all worked perfectly, then sure, why not? For example, if you could just query Google with “which cities are above 2000 meters” and get a correct answer listed as the first result, then that would be useful, no? The other issue is how content-creators enter semantic data … ideally this should be no extra effort above entering it in a non-semantic way, otherwise people won’t bother. So the lack of semantic applications is maybe more a reflection of the immaturity of the software, and/or the extra overhead of entering semantic data. At least, that’s my uninformed outsider’s view! — All the best, Nick.