Kendra evaluation
Initial evaluation by Nikola S.[edit]
Capabilities... uhh. It lets you freely edit pages. Pages may contain ordinary text, links, in the form of [[link]], what I'll call equivalences, in the form of [[key = value]], and what I'll call definitions, in the form of [[key; value]].
The equivalences let you set property of a page. Currently defined properties are:
is_a has_property has_range has_option
See http://dev1.kendra.org.uk/kendrabase/semantic_property for more info on this. Most example pages have an "is a" property while some have and some don't have more properties. AFAICT, you can think of properties as about table column definitions.
Their examples start with an ontology:
music_ontology: ---- [[is a = ontology]] This is the bare bones of an ontology for [[music]]: * [[album]] * [[song performance]] * [[artist]] * [[track]] ----
What's an ontology for I can't tell. You can make something similar to a table definition:
album: ---- [[is a = musical work]] * [[has property = album title]] -- ''not sure what this means'' * [[has property = artist]] * [[has property = year]] * [[has property = publisher]] * [[has property = song performance]] ----
Each of these properties is defined on own page. I like this idea, though I see a lot of potential for naming conflicts here. Few examples:
artist: ---- [[is a = human being]] ---- year: ---- [[has range = integers]] *[[has option = 2000]] *[[has option = 2001]] *[[has option = 2002]] *[[has option = 2003]] *[[has option = 2004]] *[[has option = 2005]] *[[has option = 2006]] ----
Kendra will let you easily define a query, for example see http://dev1.kendra.org.uk/cgi-bin/bootstrap.sh?action=query&title=album. I don't see a way to easily link to a query or include it into an article.
Finally, an example of actual data:
yes again: ---- [[is a; album]] *[[album_title; yes_again]] *[[artist; yes]] *[[publisher; huge_records_co]] *[[year; 2000]] ----
From what I can tell, it seems that it doesn't have wiki features (page history, watchlist, current events), but this of course shouldn't be too hard to implement and I suppose that it's in plan.
They are using UseMod for their wiki, and Kendra is made in Python. So I don't think that there is much possibility for direct cooperation - surely, ideas could be exchanged, but Kendra can't just be poured into MediaWiki. OTOH, the Kendra site is done in PHP, so probably some of their developers know PHP.
sent Sun, 26 Sep 2004 01:14 UTC