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 also query and include data from 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 DBPedia) and the culture will evolve to expect more and more refined and re-usable data.
Today we have a grab bag of standard Web components. Semantic Wikis should not be thought of as another element. The list of blogs, CMSs, calendars, etc, etc can all be rolled up into a semantic wiki, with re-use of information throughout - add a query and view into your blog posting, add events to any document.
Of course, other systems have and are gaining semantic features. But standard sites today are 'admin' managed. 'Users' on wiki 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 - a server can just provide raw data, the application can be in the browser.
This yields other benefits. Today many sites don't pay much attention to accessibility - use of sites by 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 care or competency of the source agency. A culture can be enabled with authentically more transparency and more participation.