Extension:Semantic Web Browser

Semantic Web Browser adds capabilities to use Semantic MediaWiki as a Semantic Web Browser (SWB). SWB is similar to Shortipedia, but intended for "every-day-use":


 * Idea to combine both content of a wiki and the Semantic Web
 * SWB focus on browsing the Semantic Web
 * SWB does not care too much about provenance tracking, as it relies solely on "official" information provided by a URI.

Note: The current version of Semantic Web Browser is a very early beta.

Feature overview

 * A presentation about Semantic Web Browser was given at SMWCon Fall 2011:

Special Page "Browse Wiki & Semantic Web"

 * New special page "Browse Wiki & Semantic Web": Special:BrowseWiki
 * Based on special page "Browse wiki“
 * Resolves annotations of "Equivalent URI" and displays the RDF together with annotated content in the wiki.
 * Start browsing from:
 * Search for URI in Special:BrowseWiki
 * Click "Browse Wiki & Semantic Web" in Toolbar

Currently, this provides the following advantages:
 * No text search but entity browsing. You can specifically ask the wiki whether it “knows” something from the Web.
 * See interconnections of wiki & Semantic Web.
 * Get additional information, e.g., I might not want to store the address of a person inside the wiki, as it might change at any time. So I only annotate the address property.
 * Still, some information I want to store into the wiki, e.g., place of birth: "Educated" Copy & Paste.

Requirements
Semantic Web Browser has been run successfully with:


 * MediaWiki 1.18 or above
 * Semantic MediaWiki 1.7 or above
 * PHP 5.3 or above

Used Libraries

 * EasyRDF - http://www.aelius.com/njh/easyrdf/

Download
You can get the code directly from SVN. The latest code can be obtained from trunk:

As this is a very early beta, we do not have tags, yet.

Later, tags can be obtained via

Where 'version' is the version number of the tag, such as 0_1 (see the available tags).

Installation
Once you have downloaded the code, place the SemanticWebBrowser directory within your MediaWiki 'extensions' directory. Then add the following code to your LocalSettings.php file:

Version
This is a copy of the release notes file on SVN, which might be more up to date than this page.

Version 0.3

 * Visualizing and hiding of incoming links.

Version 0.2
2011-10-05


 * Basic functionality of browsing implemented: Special Page BrowseWiki.
 * Committed to SVN

Version 0.1

 * Skeleton implemented

Acknowledgements
Part of the work on Semantic Web Browser has been carried out in the framework of the German Research Foundation (DFG) project entitled: "Entwicklung einer Virtuellen Forschungsumgebung für die Historische Bildungsforschung mit Semantischer Wiki-Technologie - Semantic MediaWiki for Collaborative Corpora Analysis" (SMW-CorA) (INST 367/5-1, INST 5580/1-1), in the domain of “Scientific Library Services and Information Systems“ (LIS).

Examples

 * Josef Spieler - http://www.b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Special:BrowseWiki/Josef_Spieler
 * Benedikt Kämpgen - http://www.b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Special:BrowseWiki/Benedikt_K%C3%A4mpgen
 * Browsing FOAF file of Andreas Harth - http://www.b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Special:BrowseWiki?title=Special%3ABrowseWiki&article=http%3A%2F%2Fharth.org%2Fandreas%2Ffoaf%23ah
 * A must-have example :-): Browsing FOAF file of Tim Berners-Lee: http://www.b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Special:BrowseWiki?title=Special%3ABrowseWiki&article=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2FPeople%2FBerners-Lee%2Fcard%23i

Current Bugs and Todos
 
 * Special Page is named BrowseWiki. Better would be BrowseSW, or similar.
 * If URI is located on the same server as the wiki, an error is shown. For example: . Maybe a bug of EasyRDF?
 * BBC URIs cannot be resolved, although it is possible to do curl on it using "Accept: application/rdf+xml", e.g., see.
 * Gender URI cannot be resolved, e.g., Male.
 * Maybe related to wanted RDFa (or other embedded RDF) support, e.g., http://www.shopforia.com/cgi-bin/apf4/apf4.cgi?Operation=ItemLookup&ItemId=B002GYWHSQ
 * Gender URI features Micro Data?
 * Either SMW or MW seems to add additional "//" to URIs. Therefore, no links can be used, currently.

Bugs and feature requests
You can use the Semantic MediaWiki mailing list, semediawiki-user, for questions, suggestions or bug reports about Semantic Web Browser. If possible, please add "[SWB]" at the beginning of the subject line, to clarify the subject matter. Also, it may help if you add Benedikt Kämpgen, at benedikt.kaempgen -at- kit.edu to CC.

Planned Features

 * SWB should be more robust (e.g., if URI is not resolvable or takes too much time)
 * Allow to easily gather information from the Semantic Web into the wiki. Only clicks, no writing.
 * Also display Semantic Web data on a wiki page, e.g., in an "external" factbox.
 * Blank nodes, language tags, datatypes should be considered
 * Embedded RDF support. Instead of HTML file + RDF file, e.g., only RDFa file
 * e.g., Best Buy
 * Go recursively through all same-as links
 * Highlight more important properties and values
 * Caching
 * How to automatically identify equivalent URIs?