Semantic mediawiki

Abstract

Wikis are web-based systems for the simple and collaborative management of online content, the best-known example being the free encyclopaedia Wikipedia. However, the open nature of a wiki, along with potentially changing and heterogeneous authorship, and sometimes chaotic or non-existent editorial control can also become a challenge for readers who want to access information. Classical full-text search helps to find possibly relevant pages, but cannot overcome the lack of structure that hinders powerful navigation or query answering features in classical wikis. Semantic MediaWiki described in this chapter is an extension to the well known wiki implementation MediaWiki that adresses this problem. As it is based on MediaWiki, it benefits from this stable, powerful, and yet scalable platform. The extension allows for the powerful yet simple annotation and reuse of the content inside a wiki, thus making it a semantic wiki. Semantic MediaWiki adds database-like structuring and querying capabilities on top of an existing wiki, without requiring users to develop or adhere to a rigid database schema when authoring content. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.