Notes from Wikimania 2008
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Yaron Koren
Jul 22, 2008, 9:10:17 AM7/22/08
to semanti...@googlegroups.com, Markus Krötzsch, Denny Vrandečić
Hi everyone,
Well, I'm finally back from the Wikimania conference in Alexandria. I had a great time: I met a lot of interesting people (some of whom are on this list), saw some very informative talks, gave a talk of my own, and got to discuss SMW-related issues with various people. And of course, there was Egypt, a fascinating country I'd never been to before. I'll reserve this email for just observations related to Semantic Forms and Semantic MediaWiki; if you have any interest in reading about the rest of my experiences at the conference and in Egypt, I'll probably post some things to my blog later.
First of all, there was my own talk, titled "Creating the structured semantic wiki", which I thought went well. It came on the third day of the conference, and was placed right after the SMW talk by Markus (that one was originally structured as a panel featuring Markus, Denny and me, but it became a more standard description-of-SMW presentation, which was most likely for the best, given the general lack of knowledge about the extension). The two presentations somewhat merged into one, with overlapping topics and many people staying to hear both. Thanks to a fantastic setup at the Library of Alexandria, all the talks at the conference were videotaped; most of them aren't online yet, but hopefully they will be soon, at webcast.bibalex.org (and then afterwards, of course, at techpresentations.org).
There were a few high-level Wikimedia people there for Markus' talk, which may or may not have meant something; less for my talk, partly, I think, because I was competing with a presentation by Florence Devouard, who was about to end her tenure as Wikimedia Foundation president. One person who did stay for my talk was Angela Beesley, who has connections to both Wikia, the wiki-hosting company, and Wikimedia; afterwards, she asked me about Referata, the hosting site I run, which I had mentioned at the end, and how I viewed it vis-a-vis Wikia (Wikia now offers support for SMW, though not for any of the other semantic extensions). I told her that I don't view the two as competitors, since Wikia is intended for general-use, large-scale encyclopedias, while Referata is intended more for directories and corporate usage, and I encouraged her to add support for SF and the other semantic extensions to Wikia, and also to put in a good word for doing the same thing on Wikipedia itself. We'll see if anything comes out of either of those.
The conference was also memorable for its cultural exchange with the people of Egypt and the Arab world, who made up a large number of participants; one interesting anecdote was that, of all the questions I was asked after my presentation, the one I thought was most insightful was posed by a female Egyptian student, wearing a headscarf; she asked whether it was a problem that things are referred to by name in the system, and thus that having different values with the same name would lead to bad data. "Er, yes, that's definitely a problem," I responded. I noted that there were a few potential solutions to it, and said that if I'd created a slide title "Drawbacks of semantic wikis" (there was one titled "Benefits of semantic wikis"), that certainly would have appeared on the list. Anyway, it was an interesting experience.
Earlier, there was a very informative talk by Brion Vibber, head MediaWiki developer, entitled "State of the MediaWiki". Among other things, Brion listed changes that were coming to MW and Wikipedia. Among the additions that he discussed were a new extension, called "CommentPages", that will allow for standard blog-style comment pages (some people have asked before about SF being used for such a purpose); improvements to the LiquidThreads discussion extension (same); and, maybe most relevant to SF, an dimprovement to MW's file-uploading capability to make it more user-friendly, including allowing uploading of multiple files at the same time. He also said that he didn't think WYSIWYG editing was coming any time soon to Wikipedia, because he didn't think any of the existing solutions were adequate for handling templates and other complex structures. During the Q&A session I asked Brion if, were he to start developing MediaWiki today from scratch, he would still use PHP. He said yes, which I found reassuring, and gave an explanation I found convincing, which amounted to (a) it makes it easy for people to run MediaWiki on their own servers, and (b) "it works" (i.e., don't fix it if it's not broken).
After the talk, a few people came up to Brion to ask some further questions, and Markus was among them, making the case for including SMW on Wikipedia; and asking for a clearer protocol for the evaluation of extensions to be used on Wikipedia. Brion, in his usual Buddha-like way, nodded and gave a somewhat noncomittal answer to both... alas.
I also met, and saw the presentation by, Michael Dale, who created the MetaVid extension, and runs MetaVidWiki (metvid.ucsc.edu/wiki), the wiki that uses it. MetaVid stores second-by-second information about online videos, including transcripts of what's being said, and it actually uses SMW to store that information, which I hadn't fully realized before (as I told Michael, it confuses us when there's no "Semantic" at the beginning of the extension name). He said that there was a chance that MetaVidWiki would switch over to using SF for entering semantic information, instead of having users type in SMW's property tags directly. He's also working on a project that he's getting funded by the Wikimedia Foundation to do, which also involves Kaltura, a company that creates software for online video editing. Basically, I think the idea is to create a single MediaWiki extension that lets users edit and annotate a video (in the open-source OGG format) entirely through the wiki; and then eventually get this extension onto Wikipedia. I asked Michael if this extension could be a "Trojan horse" for getting SMW onto Wikipedia, but he wasn't sure what the technical details would be. The founders of Kaltura were also there at the conference, and I talked briefly to one of them, who said that they might have interest themselves in using the semantic extensions. We'll see what comes of that.
There was a very interesting talk by Gerard Meijssen, the creator of an extension called OmegaWiki, which allows for the translation of text phrases within a wiki, using an interface similar to the one used by BetaWiki for the translation of phrases used by extensions. The idea of internationalizing SMW- and SF-based wikis, to show the same set of data across many different languages, has been brought up before, and this could be a good fit for that kind of approach.
I also met and talked with Merrick Schaefer, who works at UNICEF and runs a project called UNIWIKI, which includes both technical and non-technical aspects, but the technical part is a set of patches and extensions to MediaWiki that are meant to improve the user interface in order to make it easier to add pages and view the full set of information; you can see an example at x.mepemepe.com/index.php/Special:CreatePage . They take a non-semantic approach, but it could be that the two projects can learn from each other as far as making user-friendly interfaces.
I also saw a presentation by Mikel Maron about OpenStreetMap, a project to create freely-available street maps of the entire world using MediaWiki. He noted some problems with regular web street maps, like Google's, that OSM seeks to overcome: they're slow to update to changes in the real world, you can't reuse their data without a license, and they're often not cheap to use. OSM seems like a natural fit for street mapping with the Semantic Layers extension, and the only drawback appears to be that their set of data is currently very spotty outside of Europe, the U.K. and the U.S.
Finally, I had a number of conversations with Markus and Denny outside of the two presentations; this conference was the first time we had talked in person about SMW development, so we had a lot to go over. There were two relevant things we talked about: the first was that I brought up the issue of SMW supporting true n-ary relations, meaning properties that offer complete flexibility in setting the number, type and layout of their sub-properties (see http://semanticweb.org/wiki/N-ary_relations for much more on this). N-ary relations are relevant to SF for basically any data that's represented using multiple-instance templates. I think I convinced Markus and Denny to a greater degree of the usefulness of such a feature, although the implementation is still yet to be decided, and they said they didn't have time to add such a thing themselves. The second issue was the bundling of SMW and the related extensions into a single package. At some point last year, there was discussion of adding SF and possibly some other extensions into SMW itself: now the movement is in the other direction, to make each extension as small as possible in order to increase modularity (again, with the goal of being added to Wikipedia and other large wikis in mind). In fact, some components of SMW might themselves get spun off into separate extensions, like the timeline feature (and possibly any n-ary relations support that gets added). However, at the same time there's a desire to bundle all these extensions into a single package, for easier download, and to synchronize releases to a greater degree. Right now the plan is to use the "SMW+" project (http://wiki.ontoprise.de/ontoprisewiki/index.php/SMW%2B_-_Business_Ready_Semantic_Collaboration) for this purpose: it's a package created by Ontoprise (makers of the Halo extension) that already holds a number of extensions (including Halo, of course), and can have more added to it. This is pending the fixing of Halo to work with the current version of SMW and be easier to install and uninstall, which Markus and Denny are now being paid to do.
Well, that turned out to be quite long; and it still didn't cover all the non-SMW-related stuff from Wikimania, and the non-conference parts... but hopefully that sums up most of the technical things I learned.
-Yaron
Well, I'm finally back from the Wikimania conference in Alexandria. I had a great time: I met a lot of interesting people (some of whom are on this list), saw some very informative talks, gave a talk of my own, and got to discuss SMW-related issues with various people. And of course, there was Egypt, a fascinating country I'd never been to before. I'll reserve this email for just observations related to Semantic Forms and Semantic MediaWiki; if you have any interest in reading about the rest of my experiences at the conference and in Egypt, I'll probably post some things to my blog later.
First of all, there was my own talk, titled "Creating the structured semantic wiki", which I thought went well. It came on the third day of the conference, and was placed right after the SMW talk by Markus (that one was originally structured as a panel featuring Markus, Denny and me, but it became a more standard description-of-SMW presentation, which was most likely for the best, given the general lack of knowledge about the extension). The two presentations somewhat merged into one, with overlapping topics and many people staying to hear both. Thanks to a fantastic setup at the Library of Alexandria, all the talks at the conference were videotaped; most of them aren't online yet, but hopefully they will be soon, at webcast.bibalex.org (and then afterwards, of course, at techpresentations.org).
There were a few high-level Wikimedia people there for Markus' talk, which may or may not have meant something; less for my talk, partly, I think, because I was competing with a presentation by Florence Devouard, who was about to end her tenure as Wikimedia Foundation president. One person who did stay for my talk was Angela Beesley, who has connections to both Wikia, the wiki-hosting company, and Wikimedia; afterwards, she asked me about Referata, the hosting site I run, which I had mentioned at the end, and how I viewed it vis-a-vis Wikia (Wikia now offers support for SMW, though not for any of the other semantic extensions). I told her that I don't view the two as competitors, since Wikia is intended for general-use, large-scale encyclopedias, while Referata is intended more for directories and corporate usage, and I encouraged her to add support for SF and the other semantic extensions to Wikia, and also to put in a good word for doing the same thing on Wikipedia itself. We'll see if anything comes out of either of those.
The conference was also memorable for its cultural exchange with the people of Egypt and the Arab world, who made up a large number of participants; one interesting anecdote was that, of all the questions I was asked after my presentation, the one I thought was most insightful was posed by a female Egyptian student, wearing a headscarf; she asked whether it was a problem that things are referred to by name in the system, and thus that having different values with the same name would lead to bad data. "Er, yes, that's definitely a problem," I responded. I noted that there were a few potential solutions to it, and said that if I'd created a slide title "Drawbacks of semantic wikis" (there was one titled "Benefits of semantic wikis"), that certainly would have appeared on the list. Anyway, it was an interesting experience.
Earlier, there was a very informative talk by Brion Vibber, head MediaWiki developer, entitled "State of the MediaWiki". Among other things, Brion listed changes that were coming to MW and Wikipedia. Among the additions that he discussed were a new extension, called "CommentPages", that will allow for standard blog-style comment pages (some people have asked before about SF being used for such a purpose); improvements to the LiquidThreads discussion extension (same); and, maybe most relevant to SF, an dimprovement to MW's file-uploading capability to make it more user-friendly, including allowing uploading of multiple files at the same time. He also said that he didn't think WYSIWYG editing was coming any time soon to Wikipedia, because he didn't think any of the existing solutions were adequate for handling templates and other complex structures. During the Q&A session I asked Brion if, were he to start developing MediaWiki today from scratch, he would still use PHP. He said yes, which I found reassuring, and gave an explanation I found convincing, which amounted to (a) it makes it easy for people to run MediaWiki on their own servers, and (b) "it works" (i.e., don't fix it if it's not broken).
After the talk, a few people came up to Brion to ask some further questions, and Markus was among them, making the case for including SMW on Wikipedia; and asking for a clearer protocol for the evaluation of extensions to be used on Wikipedia. Brion, in his usual Buddha-like way, nodded and gave a somewhat noncomittal answer to both... alas.
I also met, and saw the presentation by, Michael Dale, who created the MetaVid extension, and runs MetaVidWiki (metvid.ucsc.edu/wiki), the wiki that uses it. MetaVid stores second-by-second information about online videos, including transcripts of what's being said, and it actually uses SMW to store that information, which I hadn't fully realized before (as I told Michael, it confuses us when there's no "Semantic" at the beginning of the extension name). He said that there was a chance that MetaVidWiki would switch over to using SF for entering semantic information, instead of having users type in SMW's property tags directly. He's also working on a project that he's getting funded by the Wikimedia Foundation to do, which also involves Kaltura, a company that creates software for online video editing. Basically, I think the idea is to create a single MediaWiki extension that lets users edit and annotate a video (in the open-source OGG format) entirely through the wiki; and then eventually get this extension onto Wikipedia. I asked Michael if this extension could be a "Trojan horse" for getting SMW onto Wikipedia, but he wasn't sure what the technical details would be. The founders of Kaltura were also there at the conference, and I talked briefly to one of them, who said that they might have interest themselves in using the semantic extensions. We'll see what comes of that.
There was a very interesting talk by Gerard Meijssen, the creator of an extension called OmegaWiki, which allows for the translation of text phrases within a wiki, using an interface similar to the one used by BetaWiki for the translation of phrases used by extensions. The idea of internationalizing SMW- and SF-based wikis, to show the same set of data across many different languages, has been brought up before, and this could be a good fit for that kind of approach.
I also met and talked with Merrick Schaefer, who works at UNICEF and runs a project called UNIWIKI, which includes both technical and non-technical aspects, but the technical part is a set of patches and extensions to MediaWiki that are meant to improve the user interface in order to make it easier to add pages and view the full set of information; you can see an example at x.mepemepe.com/index.php/Special:CreatePage . They take a non-semantic approach, but it could be that the two projects can learn from each other as far as making user-friendly interfaces.
I also saw a presentation by Mikel Maron about OpenStreetMap, a project to create freely-available street maps of the entire world using MediaWiki. He noted some problems with regular web street maps, like Google's, that OSM seeks to overcome: they're slow to update to changes in the real world, you can't reuse their data without a license, and they're often not cheap to use. OSM seems like a natural fit for street mapping with the Semantic Layers extension, and the only drawback appears to be that their set of data is currently very spotty outside of Europe, the U.K. and the U.S.
Finally, I had a number of conversations with Markus and Denny outside of the two presentations; this conference was the first time we had talked in person about SMW development, so we had a lot to go over. There were two relevant things we talked about: the first was that I brought up the issue of SMW supporting true n-ary relations, meaning properties that offer complete flexibility in setting the number, type and layout of their sub-properties (see http://semanticweb.org/wiki/N-ary_relations for much more on this). N-ary relations are relevant to SF for basically any data that's represented using multiple-instance templates. I think I convinced Markus and Denny to a greater degree of the usefulness of such a feature, although the implementation is still yet to be decided, and they said they didn't have time to add such a thing themselves. The second issue was the bundling of SMW and the related extensions into a single package. At some point last year, there was discussion of adding SF and possibly some other extensions into SMW itself: now the movement is in the other direction, to make each extension as small as possible in order to increase modularity (again, with the goal of being added to Wikipedia and other large wikis in mind). In fact, some components of SMW might themselves get spun off into separate extensions, like the timeline feature (and possibly any n-ary relations support that gets added). However, at the same time there's a desire to bundle all these extensions into a single package, for easier download, and to synchronize releases to a greater degree. Right now the plan is to use the "SMW+" project (http://wiki.ontoprise.de/ontoprisewiki/index.php/SMW%2B_-_Business_Ready_Semantic_Collaboration) for this purpose: it's a package created by Ontoprise (makers of the Halo extension) that already holds a number of extensions (including Halo, of course), and can have more added to it. This is pending the fixing of Halo to work with the current version of SMW and be easier to install and uninstall, which Markus and Denny are now being paid to do.
Well, that turned out to be quite long; and it still didn't cover all the non-SMW-related stuff from Wikimania, and the non-conference parts... but hopefully that sums up most of the technical things I learned.
-Yaron
Sergey Chernyshev
Jul 22, 2008, 4:09:51 PM7/22/08
to semanti...@googlegroups.com
Great overview, I hope many of the things will turn out right for SMW/SF and related and we'll get higher adoption for Semantic Wikis and more data out of it.
Speaking of bundling SMW-related stuff together, I wonder if you mentioned Semantic Bundle "initiative" or whatever it can be called and if it makes sense to mix or it with SMW+ approach or not?
Sergey
Speaking of bundling SMW-related stuff together, I wonder if you mentioned Semantic Bundle "initiative" or whatever it can be called and if it makes sense to mix or it with SMW+ approach or not?
Sergey
Yaron Koren
Jul 22, 2008, 4:28:32 PM7/22/08
to semanti...@googlegroups.com
Thanks! No, I didn't mention the "Semantic Bundle" idea, since if I understand the plans for SMW+, it essentially will do everything that was planned for the Semantic Bundle.
-Yaron
-Yaron
Sergey Chernyshev
Jul 22, 2008, 4:51:32 PM7/22/08
to semanti...@googlegroups.com
OK, I'll be happy to participate in the discussions anyway.
Sergey
Sergey
Alex Le Bek
Jul 23, 2008, 3:20:26 AM7/23/08
to semanti...@googlegroups.com
Thanks! Your overview really communicates what 'being there' is about - I found it really useful and informative - a very green way for someone - like me - at the application end of MW/SMW to understand what some of the issues are. Great news about Halo - very much looking forward to taking it up.
Alex
wendall911
Aug 29, 2008, 4:01:52 PM8/29/08
to Semantic Forms
Yaron,
Did anyone post a recording of your presentation? I'd enjoy seeing
what you had to say.
Wendall
Did anyone post a recording of your presentation? I'd enjoy seeing
what you had to say.
Wendall
Yaron Koren
Aug 29, 2008, 4:31:15 PM8/29/08
to semanti...@googlegroups.com
Oh yes, I was going to write something about that. The videos from the conference are finally getting uploaded, and Kaltura is hosting many of them. Here, in theory, is the talk about SMW (billed as me, Markus and Denny, though it was really just Markus' presentation), though I can't get the video to play:
http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/The_state_of_Semantic_MediaWiki
And here's the video of my presentation, with me looking I think balder than usual - the first 5 minutes or so are taken up with Markus answering questions (we agreed beforehand that their presentation could spill over into mine) - also, the video sometimes freezes up when you play it, although now it seems to be working fine:
http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/Creating_the_structured_semantic_wiki
Ignore the text around the video; that was just my initial proposal for the presentation.
Wikis used as examples in my talk: MographWiki, Melpedia, Discourse DB and Tech Presentations. Thanks to all of you for your contributions. :)
-Yaron
http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/The_state_of_Semantic_MediaWiki
And here's the video of my presentation, with me looking I think balder than usual - the first 5 minutes or so are taken up with Markus answering questions (we agreed beforehand that their presentation could spill over into mine) - also, the video sometimes freezes up when you play it, although now it seems to be working fine:
http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/Creating_the_structured_semantic_wiki
Ignore the text around the video; that was just my initial proposal for the presentation.
Wikis used as examples in my talk: MographWiki, Melpedia, Discourse DB and Tech Presentations. Thanks to all of you for your contributions. :)
-Yaron
Sergey Chernyshev
Aug 30, 2008, 12:12:22 AM8/30/08
to semanti...@googlegroups.com
Here they are (added by Yaron) on TechPresentations:
http://www.techpresentations.org/Creating_the_structured_semantic_wiki
http://www.techpresentations.org/Knowledge%2C_Structure%2C_and_Other_Stuff_%E2%80%93_The_State_of_Semantic_MediaWiki
Sergey
http://www.techpresentations.org/Creating_the_structured_semantic_wiki
http://www.techpresentations.org/Knowledge%2C_Structure%2C_and_Other_Stuff_%E2%80%93_The_State_of_Semantic_MediaWiki
Sergey
skierpage
Sep 2, 2008, 3:36:02 AM9/2/08
to Semantic Forms
On Jul 22, 6:10 am, "Yaron Koren" <yaro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'll reserve this
> email for just observations related to Semantic Forms and Semantic
> MediaWiki
That's gold, Yaron, pure gold! -- Kenny Bania
> I'll reserve this
> email for just observations related to Semantic Forms and Semantic
> MediaWiki
Yet I don't think you mailed it to semediawiki-user? Please do so!!
Re: OmegaWiki and translation:
if you have standard inter-language wiki links on wiki pages and
property pages, such as [[fr:Allemagne]] and [[fr:est situé en]], then
you should be able to get fact translation "for free", so
Special:Browse or Special:TranslateFacts could show Berlin est situé
en Allemagne in place of Berlin is located in Germany. No
additional translation features required (just a simple matter of
programming some complicated table queries).
--
=S
Yaron Koren
Sep 2, 2008, 2:07:17 PM9/2/08
to semanti...@googlegroups.com
Thanks - I had to look up that "Kenny Bania" quote to find out that it
was a Seinfeld reference. And I thought I'd seen most of the
episodes...
I thought it would be presumptuous of me to send it to the SMW-user
mailing list, since Markus and Denny could have sent their own summary
email if they had wanted. But if you think it's a good idea, I'll do
it.
As for doing translation, using inter-wiki links is one way to handle
it, though there are some problems with it:
- it wouldn't work for String properties
- if you already have properties and the like defined in every
language, you presumably would also have semantic relationships
defined in at least some of those languages, so you might not need the
translation in the first place.
But there are various ways to have multi-language support for semantic
wikis. I know different people have looked, or are looking, into
different ways of doing it, and hopefully people will settle on a
"standard" way eventually, because, as you note, translating a
semantic wiki should be a much easier proposition than translating a
regular text wiki.
-Yaron
was a Seinfeld reference. And I thought I'd seen most of the
episodes...
I thought it would be presumptuous of me to send it to the SMW-user
mailing list, since Markus and Denny could have sent their own summary
email if they had wanted. But if you think it's a good idea, I'll do
it.
As for doing translation, using inter-wiki links is one way to handle
it, though there are some problems with it:
- it wouldn't work for String properties
- if you already have properties and the like defined in every
language, you presumably would also have semantic relationships
defined in at least some of those languages, so you might not need the
translation in the first place.
But there are various ways to have multi-language support for semantic
wikis. I know different people have looked, or are looking, into
different ways of doing it, and hopefully people will settle on a
"standard" way eventually, because, as you note, translating a
semantic wiki should be a much easier proposition than translating a
regular text wiki.
-Yaron
Denny Vrandečić
Sep 3, 2008, 5:32:34 AM9/3/08
to semanti...@googlegroups.com
On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 8:07 PM, Yaron Koren <yar...@gmail.com> wrote:
I thought it would be presumptuous of me to send it to the SMW-user
mailing list, since Markus and Denny could have sent their own summary
email if they had wanted. But if you think it's a good idea, I'll do
it.
With Markus and me it could always be that lack of time prevents us from doing that kind of necessary and helpful communication :)
denny
denny
Sergey Chernyshev
Sep 4, 2008, 1:07:43 PM9/4/08
to semanti...@googlegroups.com
I was working on some multilingual support for MySemanticProfile app (shameless plug) I'm writing and noticed that multiple languages coexist sort of independently from each other and I have a feeling that it's the same with wiki pages - although we think of things being the same, they are not really the same in multiple languages and the only thing that unites them is logical structure which in MediaWiki is provided with templates and not really with SMW Properties.
So I'm not sure that SMW translation is that easier then MW translation - in both cases it's about copying a template, changing values and providing cross-language links between pages.
Unfortunately, SMW doesn't really support transition of language independent properties between languages and MW, SF and other tools don't really allow multiple pages for the same entity or multiple views of the same page based on the language so I can't see how we can benefit from SMW in translation except for using information about non-language properties to somehow exclude them from translation.
Sorry for a bit theoretical post ;)
Sergey
So I'm not sure that SMW translation is that easier then MW translation - in both cases it's about copying a template, changing values and providing cross-language links between pages.
Unfortunately, SMW doesn't really support transition of language independent properties between languages and MW, SF and other tools don't really allow multiple pages for the same entity or multiple views of the same page based on the language so I can't see how we can benefit from SMW in translation except for using information about non-language properties to somehow exclude them from translation.
Sorry for a bit theoretical post ;)
Sergey
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