Semantic MediaWiki/Implementation/Page Editing and Namespaces

Editor Experience

Editing an article in a Semantic MediaWiki reveals that the underlying page "source" is much the same.

Representing Relations

To express relations to other articles, you take a regular Wiki link such as "located in the southwestern corner of [[is located in::California]]" and specify the kind of link as a prefix separated by a double colon ::, thus

located in the southwestern corner of [[is located in:: California]]

Representing Attributes

To express attribute values, you put the value and optinal units inside a Wiki link, and specify the kind of value as a prefix separated by colon-equals :=, thus

estimated the city to have [[population:=1,305,737]] residents

For more details on editing links, read the Editing help on relations and attributes in the ontoworld wiki.

Relation, Attribute, and Type Namespaces

If you click on the text giving the type of a relation or attribute in the infobox, you'll see that relations like "is located in" are in a separate Relation: namespace, and attributes like "population" are in a separate Attribute: namespace.

There are Special:Relations and Special:Attributes pages that list these pages.

In order for SMW to know the format of an attribute such as population, it must have a page in the Attribute: namespace that declares its datatype using the magic relation [[has type::Type:type name]]. These datatypes are in a third namespace, Type.

Up to Implementation TOC previous: User Experience next: Representation in database and RDF

Project Semantic MediaWiki. This article is associated with the project Semantic MediaWiki.