User:Mcktimo/semantic mediawiki (SMW)

inspiration
Have you seen the posters at the site that Monica has done where there is some question in big print and then everybody marks it up adding their ideas. It is very cool. Noah transcribed a couple of them into word clouds. Also cool.

Having a way to aggregate ideas on the wiki might be useful. Tagging ala blogs is a possibility Semantic mediawiki extends tagging beyond category:tags. It adds markup like is a::city to pages. Having 300 people tag their own and anybody elses pages might not actually work out.

ideas that might work
Pages on the wiki have an overlap in what they are talking about. there a lots of ideas about what to do about the 'financial sector' or 'taxes' for instance or on ways of creating a 'participatory democracy'. Those pages could be anywhere. We are also educating ourselves reading Taibbi or Klein or ... It could be useful to assemble ideas by topic/subtopic.

What the tagging process might look like
We could start by developing a baseline collection of terms that we might want to tag with. We could automate this a bit by scanning documents with http://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/ and find the 'social study' terms. In SMW format the social study terms would become property pages.

There could be a way to make a first pass on a document putting it through a 'machine' that finds words matching the property tags and marks the document with the tags and the contexts in which that tags occur. Then the author could make refinements by hand.

what's in the box
Mediawiki itself aggregates for you by The SMW basic tools aggregate for you by
 * special:categories lists all the categories and clicking on each category lists the pages that have included that category tag.
 * giving you pages for each property tag in which are listed all the articles that include that tag.
 * listing all the property tags and the number of times they have shown up

what we might want

 * clouds of ideas that even show connections between ideas. Click on a part of the cloud and see all the connected relationships.
 * a way to gather quotations from all the documents that relate to an idea

so far what's done
I've got the semantic bundle installed on another 1.17 wiki and I'm slowly adding modules as I figure them out. I've uploaded a few pages from the OBwiki.
 * here's what special:properties looks like: http://wrec.us/hum3/Special:Properties
 * here a test page for queries: http://wrec.us/hum3/TestSWM
 * here's a page with properties: http://wrec.us/hum3/Statement_of_purpose
 * here's a list of social study terms and contexts pulled out of a page http://www.visualthesaurus.com/wordlists/112363