SIOC wiki exporter

[Fabrizio Orlandi]

Hi all,

I would like to inform you that a new SIOC exporter for MediaWiki's
wikis is now available at:
http://ws.sioc-project.org/mediawiki/

Using this exporter you will be able to SIOC-ify MediaWiki's wiki
pages (and Semantic Mediawiki's too...) and to automatically extract
wiki structural information to RDF. You can have a better browsing
experience using tools such as Tabulator and following the seeAlso
links generated.
Please reply for any questions and comments.
Many thanks to Alex. for the collaboration.

Regards,

Fabrizio
(http://www.deri.ie/about/team/member/fabrizio_orlandi/)

[Richard Cyganiak]

Quick drive-by review:

Tried it with Wikipedia and it seems to work great.

It's great to see that the RDF modelling is very solid and follows the
linked data conventions in a way that is appropriate to this kind of
service.

Maybe dcterms:modified is more appropriate than dcterms:created?

Maybe the container itself (http://en.wikipedia.org for example)
should also have an rdfs:seeAlso that points to some meaningful data
about the wiki itself (assuming such data can be obtained from the API)?

When I tried to manually construct a call to the service using the
wiki's URI (using http://en.wikipedia.org as the URI and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/
as the API folder), then I got back an RDF result that was not very
helpful. Now you could say that's my fault for using the service
wrong ;-) but it might be better to either return a description of the
Wiki, or just a 404.

Again, great work Fabrizio.

Best,
Richard

[Fabrizio Orlandi]

On Feb 11, 7:28 pm, Richard Cyganiak <rich...@cyganiak.de> wrote:
> Quick drive-by review:
>
> Tried it with Wikipedia and it seems to work great.
>
> It's great to see that the RDF modelling is very solid and follows the  
> linked data conventions in a way that is appropriate to this kind of  
> service.

Thanks! I really appreciate!

>
> Maybe dcterms:modified is more appropriate than dcterms:created?

We (me, Alex and Uldis) discussed this a lot before, and we still have
different points of view. For example if you think about the export of
an old version of a WikiArticle (which is a WikiArticle as well) the
user who made this revision is no more a modifier of this revision but
a creator, or maybe he is a modifier of the previous version. But then
Uldis suggested that for this reason a new concept to model the
version of an Item is needed...and so on...
So in the end I think this is the most simple and appropriate way to
model it, but maybe you have some other good point to share! ;)

> Maybe the container itself (http://en.wikipedia.orgfor example)  

> should also have an rdfs:seeAlso that points to some meaningful data  
> about the wiki itself (assuming such data can be obtained from the API)?
>

Yes, maybe it's just useful a seeAlso link to the Main Page of the
wiki.

> When I tried to manually construct a call to the service using the  

> wiki's URI (usinghttp://en.wikipedia.orgas the URI andhttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/

>   as the API folder), then I got back an RDF result that was not very  
> helpful. Now you could say that's my fault for using the service  
> wrong ;-) but it might be better to either return a description of the  
> Wiki, or just a 404.
>

Bad user! ;)
Well, actually you can have an error message saying that there's an
error on the URL you typed, or you can have some rdf with a owl:sameAs
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia> and a seeAlso
pointing to the rdf export of the "English_Wikipedia" page... Not too
bad for a non-expected behavior!
Anyway thanks for the feedback, i will work on that.

Cheers!

Fabrizio

[Richard Cyganiak]

On 12 Feb 2009, at 18:57, Fabrizio Orlandi wrote:
>> Maybe dcterms:modified is more appropriate than dcterms:created?
>
> We (me, Alex and Uldis) discussed this a lot before, and we still have
> different points of view. For example if you think about the export of
> an old version of a WikiArticle (which is a WikiArticle as well)

I would say that an old version of a WikiArticle is *not* a
WikiArticle but it's a WikiRevision. A WikiArticle is by definition
something changeable, while any particular version is fixed, so it's
much cleaner to consider it a different concept.

> the
> user who made this revision is no more a modifier of this revision but
> a creator,

+1

> or maybe he is a modifier of the previous version.

I wouldn't say so. Revisions cannot be modified.

> But then
> Uldis suggested that for this reason a new concept to model the
> version of an Item is needed...and so on...

I tend to agree with him on that.

> So in the end I think this is the most simple and appropriate way to
> model it, but maybe you have some other good point to share! ;)

I would say dcterms:created would be appropriate if you did indeed
model the individual revisions, but this is not what you are doing,
because the URIs such as .../wiki/Berlin identify the article and not
a particular revision. Therefore dcterms:modified is appropriate in
the RDF version of .../wiki/Berlin.

If in doubt, just use dcterms:date.

Best,
Richard