Semantic Mediawiki Spring 2010 conference

I attended http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Spring_2010_SMWCon at the MIT CSAIL Lab in sunny Boston and microblogged (on Twitter) comments on most sessions; my talk is at Encouraging Semantic Mediawiki use with non technical people‎.

State of the software - Yaron Koren

• First challenge for smw: visibility
• Second challenge for smw: communication ... duplicate effort
• "no brick walls separating users from developers," everyone welcome to contribute
• Third challenge, less important, funding ... too much money can hurt a project
• "Semantic" is an abused word, use alternatives.. platform.. but semantic will be the breakthrough?

Welcome address - David Karger

• @karger - many tools are wrong, developers 'guessing' - smw lets users emerge their data/structure, see more tools like smw
• Philip of @Ontoprise plan fine access controls; rich editor w annotations, queries; social/dashboard; wikibooks; facet browse, rules

Halo: Current status and future developments in 2010 - Philipp Zaltenbach

• @Ontoprise dev'ing linked open data #LOD between sites — integrate DBPedia (WP), etc; q about dependencies on their proprietary sw
• side skype chat discussing problems with rich text editors that mangle output, same problem for many systems

Mashup of LexWiki and WebProtege for collaborative ontology authoring - Guoqian Jiang

• Guoqian Jiang @MayoClinic Lexwiki collab ontology dev ('propose' tab), curate, integrity; SMW to scale/distrib experts, hierch probs

The Unbearable Lightness of Wiking - A Study of SMW Usability - Jie Bao

• Jie Bao SMW usability (map.rpi.edu, data.gov) UI trumps low level abilities; forms limited; page model restrictive; devs prefer dev
• RDF model 'deeply right' for flexbl DB. Fixes: small cadre dev semantics, most use; inline triples; support mult POV; SMW != RDF

Applying SMW on the Wikia environment - Timothy Quievryn

• Timothy Quievryn SMW impact on @wikia (mostly entertainment); Forms great advance, biggest wikis use it; soon all, dynamic games?

WikiTags: Connecting SMW with MS Office users - Jesse Wang

• Jesse Wang connects SMW to MS Office for user workflow, usability: uses MS SMartTags. Browse values, easy Outlook export nonfree

Flexible, purposive SMW use - Clarence Dillon

• Clarence Dillon @DeptofDefense Flexible, purposive SMW use: mil takes 5 years to roll out; hesitate to collab.
• "Power corrupts; PowerPoint corrupts absolutely"
• simpler comm model for mil w SMW. huge money/time savings. spread via peer pressure. organic, private wikis, gov2gov, triage, social
• social networking critical. remote data, vocabularies. encouraging not using Office at all, directly in wiki. wikipatterns
• avoid noisy data w forms, "nobody above Major/above 35 uses it" (with exceptions) intel. comm. "learn to collab or lose job"

SIMILE, Exhibit, Wibit, Datapress, and Dido - David Karger

• @karger SIMILE, Exhibit, Dido: structured data in embedded novel interfaces for everyone in author society — lenses, views, facets
• @karger "You only need one person to be interested in something for it to show up on the Web" Ontario breweries 1914-1915
• online course catalog in 4 days, took 6 months to get data from registrar; easy reuse data; datapress embed in wordpress cross site
• Dido inline view/data editor ­— no need to learn schemas, "Make the data look the way you want" separate representation from backend

The future of Semantic Forms - Yaron Koren

• Yaron Koren @wikiworks Next steps for Semantic Forms better integrated; easier SMW class maint; sep model/view, device UIs; use XML?
• wiki markup vs xml, issues moving away from wiki model to create richer, simpler UIs, markup too complicated: a crossroads

Handling n-ary data - Yaron Koren

• No great answers for n-ary data in SMW — no rich page editing, problems with page model?

RSS

Blikied on May 23, 2010