About the ontology
From Ontoprise ISWC Wiki
Your conference "Wiki On a Stick" is equipped with the latest edition of an enhanced Semantic MediaWiki, including SMW+. SMW+ is being developed as part of project Halo and is a semantic wiki that let's you easily create and browse a sophisticated semantic wiki. For this edition we have provided you with some example ontologies to explore including the underlying properties for the conference material we have included. Having semantic relationships embedded in a wiki is a very powerful concept. For example almost every table or list of conference data you come across in this wiki is generated dynamically with the semantic data embedded in the various wiki pages that define people, presentations and events.
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How to explore the ontology
The conference ontology on this wiki was built in only a few days. If you are curious we have included a visual model of just the piece of the ontology for the conference. While it is often not practical to use visual models for developing large ontologies, when working on small sections of a new ontology it can be helpful for communicating your ideas.
In our case the onotologist worked with the visual model open in another window of his computer while he built the ontology in the wiki. It's hard to say which went faster building in the wiki or drawing the model. Ok, well drawing pictures is quicker but the development cycle for building with SMW+ is very rapid. We think so and we think you will too if you give it a try.
Other ontologies
In addition to the ontology developed for the conference we included some elements from other popular ontologies such as SWRC, RDFS and FOAF. For example when exploring in the ontology browser you will see a category for “Person” and “Organization”. When browsing the people pages of the wiki you can export vCard data based on this ontology. If you prefer, you can directly export the RDF data for any wiki page that contains semantic values.
Adding on to the ontology
This is your semantic wiki now, so feel free to start building your own ontology. Create new pages using the existing ontology or create new categories and new properties. Build templates to display pages and even create forms for editing semantic wiki pages. It's easy to do and very hard to break anything. And as we say with all wiki based technology; “the cost of experimentation is extremely low”. If you mess up, every page has an undo feature and you can explore the history of any page to go back as far as you want. So give it a try.
After you explore some of the help pages you can get started by clicking on “special pages” in the Navigation bar toolbox. Look for the links to all the SMW+ tools including pages to create new properties, create new templates and create new forms. You might want to draw a model of your new ontology or you might want to just dive right in. You might wish to try importing an existing ontology using the gardening tools. Or you may just want to experiment with the query interface.
Whatever you choose to do, we hope you enjoy this "Wiki on a Stick", a semantic conference program you can slip in your pocket.
Helpful links to learn more
- Mediawiki help - Basic help on how to use MediaWiki (without SMW)
- Semantic MediaWiki user manual - - This is the foundation for SMW+ The help pages here will teach you the very basics about placing properties on pages and building queries to display semantic data
- Semantic forms - No doubt the coolest part of SMW+ with Semantic Forms it is easy to make forms that the moset novice computer user can use to enter or change semantic data on the wiki.SMW+
