Semantic MediaWiki

What is Semantic MediaWiki?

The Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an extension to MediaWiki – the wiki-system powering Wikipedia – with semantic technology, thus turning it into a semantic wiki. While articles in MediaWiki are just plain texts, SMW allows users to add structured data, comparable to the data one would usually store in a database. SMW uses the fact that such data is already contained in many articles: users just need to "mark" the according places so that the system can extract the relevant data without "understanding" the rest of the text. With this information, SMW can help to search, organise, browse, evaluate, and share the wiki's content.

As an example, meeting minutes can be easily kept in Semantic MediaWiki and can be instantaneously annotated semantically, such that action items or open issues can be related to responsible persons, so that they can retrieve their personal to-do lists.

SMW is an open source project which embraces many people and organisations as contributors. The SMW project is maintained on semantic-mediawiki.org.

What is SMW+

SMW+ is ontoprise's business-ready distribution of Semantic MediaWiki including essential enhancements to it. These functionality and usability related enhancements have been developed in the course of the Project halo in order to facilitate the use of Semantic Wikis for a large community of users. Main focus of the developments was to create tools that increase the ease of use of SMW features and advertise the immediate benefits of semantic content.

Despite these fundamental enhancements, SMW+ is still open source (i.e. GPL) software. You can download the source code (i.e. the "halo-extension") here.

Typical applications of SMW+

SMW+ is the universal tool to boost collaborative work and to capture and publish any knowledge in your department or company. You want to employ Semantic MediaWiki typically for:

• repository for training materials
• project management activities
• company-wide directory for people and their skills
• documentation of software projects
• co-ordination of advertising campaigns

Products to re-use knowledge

Depending on the usage and the number of people using your semantic MediaWiki installation, the amount of captured knowledge will increase. Also you probably want to apply rule knowledge to generate new knowledge. In either case we are offering ontoprise's standard products for professional knowledge management:

• OntoStudio(R)
• OntoMap(R) to import knowledge from the semantic MediaWiki and to prepare it for import into OntoStudio(R)

Want more information?

Please find additional information on SMW+ 1.3 here:

• Give SMW+ a try
• Video demo of SMW+
• Video showcase: SMW+ for PIM

This is not enough? Then send us an inquiry - we are happy to assist you!