SMW Summary

If you entered an actor, you should see them below, they will also be present on other queries:

	Born	Died	Is from	Died in	Died of
Arnold Bush	3 April 1911	20 July 1996	England	Hertfordshire	Dancing accident
Bob Herrelsmorm	9 April 1907	20 August 1976		London, UK	Mysterious causes
Bob Newhart	1 June 1942		United States
Christina Poulet	14 April 1907	20 August 1976		Somerset, UK	Stage fright
Katherine Cardiff	11 April 1901	20 July 1996		London, UK	Dancing accident
Paul Devonshire	10 October 1911	10 September 1986		Scotland, UK	Polo accident

Summary

In these pages, you've seen how to build on the existing, widely available, hypertext web by adding re-usable data. Going from the flexibility of wikis, we've encoded re-usable information that can be used for queries and views. Form front ends can simplify entering field data.

What hasn't been covered is re-using data across sites. Semantic Mediawiki extensions allow auto completion based on ontologies from other sites. So your site about actors could query a site about locations or causes of death. Semantic Mediawiki can query RDF data sources, tab separated values and database data locally or on other sites.

While Semantic Mediawiki is just one approach to SemWeb, it practically builds on the underlying principals of wikis and the most popular open source Wiki software that has many extensions and supporters and users, including Wikipedia. When Wikipedia flips a switch, all its data will become semantic (evidenced today in sites like http://dbpedia.org/About) and the culture will evolve to expect more and more refined and re-usable data.

Standard sites today are 'admin' managed. 'Users' on these types of sites also expect to participate more. They can create or augment data types and add their own views. They can use their own front ends to work with data. In fact, browsers tomorrow are expected to be more interactive and rely on server processing less.

This yields other benefits. Today many sites don't pay much attention to accessibility - use of sites with people with reduced vision, for example. On a well designed site with good structure and cues, a person with disabilities can be greatly enabled, perhaps more so than people who just read a page from top to bottom. But on poorly designed sites, it can become extremely tedious or impossible to access data. Well structured data using formats like RDF can allow alternative front ends for special uses to be easily created, regardless of the competency of the source agency.