Help:Semantic Web

Although Semantic MediaWiki is designed to be used without additional technical background knowledge, it is closely related to well-known Semantic Web technologies. These technologies enable any SMW-equipped wiki to share its knowledge with external applications by encoding it into the standard OWL/RDF format.

This article is an overview of some related resources. These should be instructive for those who are familiar with ontology languages or who wish to implement tools that use Semantic MediaWiki's RDF export. As such this article is primarily for:


 * 1) Administrators of CreationWiki.
 * 2) Outside administrators who might wish to reuse CreationWiki's RDF exports. Be advised that the same GFDL that covers the text of this wiki also applies to its RDF exports.

Editors should go to Help:Semantics to find help on using the wiki.

Glossary

 * Semantic Web refers to a planned reconfiguration and enhancement of the World Wide Web, one that connects information, not merely by cross-linking of articles but also by explicit semantic annotation of article content.


 * The Web Ontology Language, or OWL for short, is a new language for semantic and synoptic description of article content.


 * The term OWL DL (for Web Ontology Language, Description Logics) refers to one of three varieties of OWL, that allows full semantic expressiveness while assuring that the concepts that it expresses are fully computable and decidable.


 * The Resource Description Framework, or RDF for short, is a model for creating an export, in Extensible Markup Language (XML), of key facts about a subject under discussion in any article.


 * The SPARQL Protocol and Recursive Query Language is, as its name implies, a query language (quite similar to the standard Structured Query Language for databases) for semantically annotated Web pages, and a protocol for making pages amenable to such queries.

RDF export
The explicit semantic content of Semantic MediaWiki is formally interpreted in the OWL DL ontology language, and is made available in OWL/RDF format. For further details on the exported format and how to obtain it, see Help:RDF export.

External reuse
Tools that can process OWL/RDF in a meaningful way (inlcuding many RDF tools), can also be used with Semantic MediaWiki. The article Help:Semantic reuse lists a number of applications that have been tested with the output of a number of wikis that use SMW extensively.