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Submissions/An SMW-powered Analytic Encyclopedia

From Wikimania 2010 • Gdańsk, Poland • July 9-11, 2010


Information

This is an open submission for Wikimania 2010.


Title of the submission

An SMW-powered Analytic Encyclopedia

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)

Presentation

Author of the submission

Mark Greaves

E-mail address or username (if username, please confirm email address in Special:Preferences)

markg@vulcan.com

Country of origin

USA

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

Vulcan Inc.

Personal homepage or blog
Abstract (please use no less than 300 words to describe your proposal)

When Semantic MediaWiki was created five years ago, one of its goals was to enable the creation of a new type of wiki-based encyclopedia. This new type of encyclopedia would allow people to author simple data elements and data types in their articles in addition to the normal text, and also support basic queries over the authored data. It was a simple and extremely powerful idea, and hundreds of successful wikis were built using SMW and its cousin SMW+. However, the promise of a true semantic encyclopedia remained unfulfilled.

In this presentation, we will orbit back to that original goal of Semantic MediaWiki, and present a prototype of a new kind of encyclopedia built with SMW+. We have created a prototype of what a semantic version of Wikipedia would look like, using ~2000 pages from Wikipedia and ~40000 triples. We leverage SMW+ for the core semantic platform, DBpedia for the semantic data, Ontobroker for rule handling and rule management, and Simile and Open Flash Charts for visualization. We will show how the various semantic features provide a set of compelling new capabilities for article authors (generated information graphics, dynamic tables, consistency checkers, basic analytics) and for article readers (faceted navigation, sophisticated queries, interactive visualizations). Our code allows article authors to collaborate on and discuss individual data values, achieving a neutral point of view, with full provenance back to the original data sources. Finally, our code supports derived assertions and full SPARQL-based publication back to the universe of Linked Data and the Semantic Web.

We call this new prototype encyclopedia an “analytic encyclopedia,” because of the way that adding data organically in the encyclopedia supports an increased level of useful data analytics for both authors and readers. In this presentation, we will describe our prototype, discuss the challenges we faced in its construction, and give a brief demo.


Track (People and Community/Knowledge and Collaboration/Infrastructure)

Knowledge and Collaboration

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

No

Slides or further information (optional)


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  1. Kocio 01:41, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Jérôme 13:58, 15 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]