How to get your Semantic MediaWiki ready to Fly¶

…some SMW Best Practices

Recommendation 1: Design properties based on concrete requirements¶

Approach 1:: Install SMW and rely on the Wisdom of the Crowds. → Not known to have worked anywhere (yet?).
Approach 2:: Kick-start SMW usage by creating properties, input forms, data annotations, and queries that show their use.; → Main questions: Which data should be stored? How?
(Fortunately, it is easy to revisit these decisions later)

Better question: What should be done with the data?

Desired queries
Special displays (e.g. timeline)
Other uses for data?

Note

Recommendation 1 Design properties based on concrete requirements

Recommendation 2: Collect Data with Templates (and Semantic Forms)¶

Most common style of annotation:
- Property assignments in templates
- Integrate display (template) and semantics (data)
- Allows further integration with editing (Semantic Forms)
Many parameter values can be used as property values
Templates can be used to compute additional data
Special case: store absence of data
- SMW cannot query for pages that lack some annotation
- Templates can add data to indicate that some information is missing (use #if and friends)

Recommendation 3: Do not try to model the world¶

Instead: Start small and scale fast

It is impossible to capture all human knowledge in property-value pairs.
~> How much should be covered ?
~> How exact and detailed should it be captured ?

Focus on specific aspects of a domain (selected subsets of the universe of discourse)

Remember → Do not attempt to build an ontology of the world → Start with the easy and obvious (80/20 rule) → Do not abuse SMW

Recommendation 4: Keep the Template balanced¶

Do not solve all problems with one template!

The Template Temptation
- Templates can use #if to control their behaviour based on parameters
- With SMW, templates can use #show and #ask to gather more data to control the behaviour

→ Complicated, unmanageable template pages → Slow down on page display and rendering → Unreasonable server load

Letztes Update: 18. September 2024