Extension:SemanticWebBrowser

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


 * Idea is to compare the content of a wiki and of the Semantic Web
 * SWB focus on browsing the Semantic Web
 * SWB only shows "official" information provided by equivalent URIs of a wiki page

Requirements
Semantic Web Browser has been run successfully with:


 * MediaWiki 1.23 or above
 * Semantic MediaWiki 1.7 or above
 * PHP 5.3 or above

Used Libraries

 * EasyRDF 0.7.2 - http://www.easyrdf.org/

Configuration parameters

 * $swbgToolboxBrowseSemWeb: The toolbox of each content page show a link to browse the semantic web of that page using Special:Browse Wiki & Semantic Web

User rights

 * none, so far

Versions

 * Version 0.4
 * Special:BrowseWiki has become Special:BrowseSW


 * Version 0.3
 * Visualizing and hiding of incoming links.


 * Version 0.2
 * Basic functionality of browsing implemented: Special Page BrowseWiki.
 * Committed to SVN


 * Version 0.1
 * Skeleton implemented

Feature List with Examples

 * One can start browsing directly from the special page: http://www.b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Special:BrowseSW
 * One can either enter any article from the wiki, e.g. http://b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Special:BrowseSW/Benedikt_K%C3%A4mpgen
 * or any URI which shall be browsed, e.g. http://b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Special:BrowseSW?title=Special%3ABrowseSW&article=http%3A%2F%2Fvavlab.ee.boun.edu.tr%2Fcarera%2Fonlira.owl%23Liver
 * Browsing a wiki article with SWB means:
 * all the semantic relationships within the wiki are shown in the same manner as using the Special:Browse page
 * if any equivalent URI is specified in the article, SWB loads and displays all the triples containing the URI as subject or object
 * At every page there is a toolbox entry "Browse Wiki & Semantic Web", so browsing an article can be done directly using that entry, e.g. http://www.b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Benedikt_K%C3%A4mpgen
 * All displayed subject or object URIs can be further browsed simply by clicking on the eye symbol next to the URI. - http://www.b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Special:BrowseSW/Benedikt_K%C3%A4mpgen
 * Blacklisted URIs (rdfs, owl) are properly handled, so far a String is shown. - http://www.b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Special:BrowseSW/Benedikt_K%C3%A4mpgen
 * Pages from any namespace can be linked via equivalent URI and are shown as pages in browser for incoming and outcoming links:
 * main namespace - http://www.b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Special:BrowseSW/Benedikt_K%C3%A4mpgen
 * category - http://b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Special:BrowseSW/The_RDF_Data_Cube_Vocabulary
 * property - http://b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Special:BrowseSW/Property:Is-20in-20dataset
 * A must-have example :-): Browsing FOAF file of Tim Berners-Lee: http://www.b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Special:BrowseSW?title=Special%3ABrowseSW&article=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2FPeople%2FBerners-Lee%2Fcard.rdf

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.

Bugs

 * Files on own server apparently cannot be browsed, e.g., see http://b-kaempgen.de/index.php/Special:BrowseSW?title=Special%3ABrowseSW&article=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.b-kaempgen.de%2Ffoaf.rdf%23me

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. Bnodes, language tags, Literal types, are ignored, at the moment.
 * 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? This would not require to mention all equivalent uris on a page but to automatically consider those that are linked from equivalent links.
 * Highlight more important properties and values
 * Caching for faster reaction time. Caching we could possibly implement by connecting SWB to an external SPARQL store that can be stored using SPARQL update queries.
 * How to automatically identify equivalent URIs?
 * RDFa support
 * e.g., http://www.shopforia.com/cgi-bin/apf4/apf4.cgi?Operation=ItemLookup&ItemId=B002GYWHSQ
 * Link to Gender Male funktioniert nicht mit SWB http://metadataregistry.org/concept/show/id/1134.html
 * SWB should be more robust if too large files are loaded. For example SWB could only partly load some file or at least abort after some specific time with an understandable error.

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). Also, work was carried out with the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) within project I01, SFB/TRR 125 “Cognition-Guided Surgery“.