User:Dave/Squishy

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Revision as of 23:47, 19 June 2011 by Dave (talk | contribs) (Overview and other links.)
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Overview

MediaWiki is wiki software, released under the GPL, that is used by Wikimedia projects and others. It is an implementation of a wiki, a content pool that anyone can freely edit. It is developed using MediaZilla (MediaWiki's version of BugZilla).

MediaWiki Architecture

Basic info on how MediaWiki works.
Another look at MediaWiki architecture provided by Science Commons.
A PDF of Mark Bergsma's (Wikimedia Foundation) PowerPoint presentation on Wikimedia's global architecture. It includes lots of nice diagrams showing everything from basic MW architecture of a small LAMP installation to complex, load-balanced environments. Shows MediaWiki's scalability.

Extensions

A bit dated, but still useful.
The InputBox extension is a MediaWiki extension that adds already created HTML forms to wiki pages. Users can "complete" a form (entering text, selecting menu items, etc.) by entering text into the box.
Provides LDAP authentication, and some authorization functionality for MediaWiki.
The CategoryTree extension provides a dynamic view of the wiki's category structure as a tree.

Semantic MediaWiki (and Related) Extensions

Semantic MediaWiki and various of its spinoff extensions are also available in two different packages: SMW+ and Semantic Bundle.
Semantic Bundle is a pre-packaged bundle of extensions for use with wikis that are based around the Semantic MediaWiki extension.
SMW+ is a semantic enterprise Wiki for teams that need a human-readable and agile knowledge base for collaborating on rich text and data in their daily work.

SMW-based extensions included in Semantic Bundle are:

  • Semantic Forms - allows wiki administrators to create easy-to-use, domain-specific editing interfaces for their wiki
  • Semantic Maps - allows for using various map services to display semantic coordinate data and enter coordinates within forms
  • Semantic Tasks - allows for sending reminder and notification emails to users for tasks

Other (non-SMW) extensions included in Semantic Bundle are:

  • Admin Links - defines a special page that serves as a "control panel" for administrative tasks
  • Approved Revs - allows for setting a single revision of any page as the "approved" one; the approved revision's data is stored by SMW
  • ArrayExtension - defines useful parser functions for manipulating arrays
  • Data Transfer - allows importing data into and out of the wiki via XML and CSV formats
  • External Data - allows for displaying data from outside APIs in the wiki
  • Header Tabs - allows to convert top-level sections of the page into tabs; often used with Semantic Forms to make long forms more user-friendly
  • Maps - allows for displaying individual points and geocoding addresses using various map services; required by Semantic Maps
  • Page Object Model (POM) - a code library that helps extension and bot developers manipulate parts of structured wiki text easily using a model similar to the W3C DOM. It is also a MediaWiki API extension to perform such modifications remotely.
  • ParserFunctions - adds useful parser functions for programming logic and string manipulation
  • Replace Text - provides a form for administrators to do a text search-and-replace across the wiki
  • Validator - parameter-handling framework for MediaWiki and extensions; required by both Maps and Semantic Maps
  • Widgets - allows adding widgets to wiki by simply creating pages in the "Widget:" namespace

SMW-related extensions NOT included in Semantic Bundle but worth considering are:

The Halo extension is an extension to Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) and has been developed as a part of Project Halo in order to facilitate the use of Semantic Wikis for a large community of users. Main focus of the development was to create tools that increase the ease of use of SMW features and advertise the immediate benefits of semantically enriched content. Halo and related extensions are both available as stand alone packages and as a pre-packaged bundle (called SMW+), which can be deployed immediately.
This extension extends the RDF import and export functionality in Semantic MediaWiki by providing import of arbitrary RDF triples (not only OWL ontologies, as was the case before), and a SPARQL endpoint that allows write operations.
From Article: "The original use case behind the RDFIO Semantic MediaWiki Extension (developed as part of Google Summer of Code 2010) was to hook up SMW with Bioclipse. It is now for the first time possible to add and remove SMW facts from inside Bioclipse..."