Revision as of 09:07, 22 October 2013

About this Site

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The Age of Water

Our starting point is the Changing Connectivity in the Hydroscape

A Semantic Wiki for Organic Data Sharing

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Structuring Content in a Semantic Wiki

To structure the content of this wiki, we use a semantic wiki framework. We use an extension of Semantic MediaWiki that enables contributors to use structured semantic properties to describe the contents of the wiki.

One way in which this wiki structures content is though pre-defined categories. Pages can have special categories, which gives the wiki pages a pre-defined semantic structure. Special categories include Task, Answer, and Data.

In addition, each page has a section called "Structured Properties", where contributors can specify properties and values of the topic of the page. Any contributor can define new properties on the fly. Any contributor can change an existing property by one that is used elsewhere, effectively normalizing the use of the property across pages and therefore across objects.

Another extension in this wiki is that contributor credit is tracked and shown. At the bottom of each page, the contributors to that page are shown together with the details of their contributions to that page. Contributors can also have their own pages, which include any background information they wish to share, and where the edits that they have made are automatically summarized and shown.

Tasks

An example of a task page: Document PIHM Model

Accessing Structured Content Externally

The structured content in this semantic wiki is represented with the W3C RDF semantic representation standard. This allows others to access and import the content of this wiki into their applications. There is extensive documentation about this API here.

Using Structured Content to Dynamically Create Sections of Wiki Pages

Those properties can then be used to answer queries that aggregate automatically those properties and pages. Below are some examples of how a query can be stated using those structured properties, and the automatically generated table that answers the query. These queries can be used to create dynamically generated content.

Example: Get a List of Lakes

No Lakes in Knowledge Base

How to Add Text to this Wiki

This wiki also allows adding regular wiki text and content. When editing, and before adding any text, click on the "Save Page" button at the bottom. After that select a category. Then edit.

See the Quick Guide to Using a Wiki, or the detailed User's Guide.