Grants:TPS/Hypergrove/SMWConFall2015
This had been a submission to the Wikimedia Participation Support process, but was withdrawn or otherwise cancelled (not denied).
Proposed participation[edit]
Extension:SMW Ontologies is a broad effort to maintain support for the SemanticMediaWiki (SMW) extension as a vital reason to install MediawWiki software within organizations large and small. The SMW community is now at a crossroads, faced with several rather existential alternatives:
- (a) no-ontology data storage and retrieval such as Extension:Cargo
- (b) multilingual data storage/retrieval such as Extension:Wikibase and
- (c) no-form WYSIWYG-style data entry such as Extension: Visual Editor
Extension:SMW Ontologies seeks to both restate and reinforce the original rationale behind SMW: robustly engineered Web 3.0 functionality driving information sharing within and between MW communities.
To this end, Extension:SMW Ontologies includes
- (a-1) an "SMW Ontology" with concept/property definitions central to MediaWiki & SemanticMediaWiki
- (a-2) definitions of commonly known ontologies from the ISO; W3C; United Nations; and others
- (a-3) definitions of a comprehensive 'grammatical' ontology quite intuitive for general semantic relations markup
- (b-1) syntax options for multilingual annotations and multilingual queries, involving new defined datatypes (I18N and IRI)
- (b-2) syntax options for "SMW Variables" and for "filtered inverse relations"
- (c-1) Visual Editor input widgets and parser functions that convert Turtle-style expressions to semantic triples
- (c-2) Visual Editor output templates and parser functions which display property values either retrieved or derived by calculation
I am invited to give a talk about Extension:SMW Ontologies to this conference, however my funds are extremely thin right now. I have also volunteered to provide a pre-conference training session about "Crafting SMW Ontologies" should I be able to attend.
Goal and expected impact[edit]
My specific goal is to stabilize an SMW community confronted by a growing awareness that
- (a) without shared ontologies, there exists no 'easy' way to share annotations, templates or queries
- (b) without multilingual annotations/queries, there exists no 'consistent' way to input or query language-qualified text
- (c) without Visual Editor -related gadgets, there is no SMW integration path consistent with MediaWiki strategies & tactics
Without common data models, or multilingual properties, or better SMW query syntax, or WYSIWYG editor integration, not much reason exists (for some) to install SemanticMediaWiki and, consequently, less reason to install MediaWiki core software itself. However, with these changes, I do expect (a) more S/MW installations (b) more information sharing (c) more eyeballs.
I am applying under the heading "Promote the adoption of great ideas" where it lists "Showcase and recognize the greatest innovations of the Wikimedia movement, and create community spaces dedicated to the exploration of new ideas." I am also applying under the heading "Increase Reach" as my partner (in South Africa) and I are focused on deploying SemanticMediaWiki for low-technology communities in South Africa and its neighbors.
Budget breakdown[edit]
- Travel (round trip airfare from Seattle to Barcelonia): now USD $1,400
- Accommodation: USD 55.31 per night x 5 nights = USD 276
Endorsements[edit]
- Hypergrove's assumption is an appropriate description of the current situation and the challenges we are facing. These are indeed not solely restricted to the SMW community but reach well beyond. He is a long time member of the Semantic MediaWiki community providing feedback and insights especially regarding ontology usage and creating relations between content in different languages as well as other types of content. His effort to create the SMW Ontologies extensions proves in my opinion his valuable involvement. He also participated in previous SMWCons with highly interesting presentations. This very elaborate request displays that another very interesting participation with a lot of resulting impact is to be expected. Additionally he offered to do an extra workshop. I believe it is worth awarding the grant requested. [[kgh]] (talk) 13:28, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
- Hypergrove is very passionate when it comes to using Semantic information in wikis to enable better information sharing. His voice is needed in the discussion at SMWCon for the best way to expose and share information to help the SMW community think about the direction they want to take. The presentation he gave at a previous SMWCon demonstrated how deeply he has thought about the issues. ☠MarkAHershberger☢(talk)☣ 14:47, 31 August 2015 (UTC)