[OLPC library] Semantic MediaWiki

[Edward Cherlin]

On Feb 14, 2008 6:15 PM, Jameson Chema Quinn <jquinn at cs.oberlin.edu> wrote:
> I glanced at this during the activity discussion, thinking about keeping the
> activity lists. It seemed to me that this had two issues: one is that the
> metadata is searchable but not easily includable on a given page;

That's why I suggested putting it in the templates. We can also use
the existing Category structure, but make it easier to extend and also
make it more regular.

> and the
> other is the learning curve, given that extra semantics must be rigorously
> defined. I suspect that for a general-public wiki, it would be more trouble
> than it was worth.

On some of the general public pages it might be problematic, but for
the technical and organizational content, including activities,
content pages, OLPC affiliates, localization, and documentation, it
could be a boon. It is certainly not an all-or-nothing question.

When we get out of our current hand-building model to mass production,
some sort of semantic Web will be vital to organizing educational
content by topic, by locality, by language, and by other factors. An
example is the library at Commonwealth of Learning, which has over a
million modules. We will need the kind of tagging mechanism that
Flickr uses, so that the children can tag material for each other's
benefit.

> I also posted a link to a similar concept, WikiDB or something, which seemed
> to be more appropriate technology on both the above counts, but which is
> unfortunately not a mature program, more like alpha stage. Oh well.

I don't think it is alpha. It's apparently at version 0.0.1, with lots
of essential features not implemented at all.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiDB


-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
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"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay