Wikipedia and the Semantic Web, part II

What does it take to be free?

Is Wikipedia an island?

Do we know what we know?

Wikipedia is about «free access to the sum of all human knowledge»
Jimmy Wales, this morning

But the whole might be more than the sum of its parts …

Do we know what we know?

There are articles about all major cities.
All freely accessible.

Great! So what are the world's ten greatest cities with female mayors?

What can we do about it?

Let's make more article lists!
But who is going to maintain them?
Then why not just make a category?
We might end up with more categories than articles … (+)
But there is still the text search!
… which just fails for complex questions. (+)

Semantic MediaWiki

Idea: extend MediaWiki, the software Wikipedia runs on, so that users can make knowledge more explicit.

Demonstration from ontoworld.org

--> demo

Outlook

Applications

Allow people to access more of Wikipedia's knowledge
Machine-assisted quality enhancement
Machine-assisted comparison of multiple language Wikipedias
Wikipedia data in external applications, e.g. on your desktop

Semantic Web workshop: on Sunday at, well, 9:00am

Download link for Semantic MediaWiki extension at ontoworld.org

Credits: code and support was contributed by Klaus Lassleben (doccheck GmbH), Kai Hüner, S Page, Richard Cyganiak, and the Semantic Wiki Interest Group.