Wiki as Semantic Web?

Monday, 28 April 2003

Anybody else notice how you can use a Wiki like a Semantic Web engine?

For example, define a WikiName, say PersonThing. Only use the PersonThing WikiName on pages that identify… person things! You’re basically saying

a :PersonThing .

OK, it’s limited; I’m not sure how you’d get any other predicates in there. But you can do some nifty stuff in there; by using certain objects on a page and then doing searches on multiple facets, you can capture a lot of information. It seems like a happy little corner between practical, useful software, Semantic Web and REST (now that I’ve excluded everyone…).

Maybe this is old news, or maybe I’m still a little under the weather, but I think there’s something cool about this. Is there any linkage between SW and WikiLand out there (besides RSS?)

4 Comments

joshlee said:

Take a look at Meatball’s IndexingScheme page (http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?IndexingScheme) for a list of different ways in which you can walk the graph of links that are formed in a wiki. I’m pretty much a complete tyro when it comes to Semantic Web stuff, so I don’t know if any of these schemes lead you to a particularly triple-like view.

The impression I’ve gotten in the past is that there is a reluctance among wiki-ists to apply too strict of a metadata or mapping scheme to their text (see the categorization discussion at C2 (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PleasePleaseDontCategorizeEveryPageOnWiki)), preferring human readability to machine readability.

Tuesday, April 29 2003 at 11:16 AM

Danny Ayers said:

I’m hoping to have graphic Wiki visualization/editing implemented in Ideagraph in the next few weeks. Pages as nodes (RDF resources + a few key properties), the hyperlinks between them as the arcs displayed by default (RDF properties).

Your idea here hadn’t occurred to me at all. Bill Seitz has been talking about smartening Wikis, including exploiting WikiWords more.

I think I’ll only get a handle on what can be done once I’ve got something implemented to play with ;-)

Thursday, May 1 2003 at 10:03 AM

Danny Ayers said:

links dropped through:

Ideagraph : http://ideagraph.net

Bill Seitz’s Wiki notes : http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/FutureWikiWeblogFeatures

Thursday, May 1 2003 at 10:05 AM

BillSeitz said:

Yeah, I think there’s some potential for interesting stuff here.

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/z2003-04-16-WikiwordAsTopic

And when you think about InterWiki features like SisterSites based on connecting across wikis having nodes with the same name, things get doubly weird….

Wednesday, May 7 2003 at 3:18 AM

mark nottingham