Talk:Semantic MediaWiki/Requirements

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Hi, I come from a geospatial background and am currently engaged in a project that is dealing with a couple of issues: - Semnatic convergence for discovery of scientific data - data that is accessible via web services using existing data standards.

The way that we are doing this to a wide range of scientific content is that we allow user to 'tag' web map services with different discovery metadata, for example, keyword, spatial, temporal and a free text search. There are some important impication that may help you in your moves towards the semantic web: - The keywords that are used to tag a data web map service are hierarchical and managed from a centralised list. - We are using exiting spatial and temporal standards for tagging web map services, hence allowing people to enter metadata in standard method that can be exploited by other people who use similar standards.

The next phase of this project is to create a web feature catalogue. In simple terms a feature catalogue is system that defines features that a community of interest uses and has a interest and mandate to maintain. For example, the Department of Roads and Transport Infrastructure may define the concept of a road and maintian it according to the government legilation. On the other hand the concept a species may be managed by multiple agencies, who converge and agree on a way to classify a particular species, for example, universities, museums etc. The benefit of a community of interest maintaining one or more feature types (eg roads, streets, avenues etc) is that they have a business manadate to maintain such things, and if once defined the definition that they have taken to define that feature type can be accepted and used by others as well. Those who feel that it should be extended can then join that community of interest and extend it. The benefit of such an approach is that we start creating reuseable components (of concepts) which starts to develop the basis of the semantic web, ie by having semantic convergence or an agreed meaning to a concept, resulting in a well defined feature.

I thint that the wikipedia community is a community that can create a standard method for 'tagging' information in the forms of keywords, spatial, temporal etc. But even more than that I think that the wikipedia community is in a position where they can start the development of a web feature catalogue which starts to define reuseable features in a standard format, and one that is accessible via web services.

I would like to discuss this further with anyone who is interested and perhaps start discussions of web feature catalogues. Any feedback would be appreciated.