Yaron is Writing

• I was at the “NYC wiki-conference 2009“, held on the NYU campus, over the weekend; my thoughts about the conference are here. The one thing I forgot to mention, on a technical note, was a five-minute demo by Tom Maaswinkel, showing a MediaWiki wiki being edited via the soon-to-be-released Google Wave - it wowed the audience, as Google Wave demos tend to always do.
• Jeroen De Dauw released version 0.2 of Maps and Semantic Maps. These new versions have, among other improvements, support for Yahoo! geocoding, and just better-looking code, which is going to be important in the long run, as other developers get their hands on it and start tinkering with the code.
• I added Maps and Semantic Maps to Referata - Semantic Google Maps will be gone shortly. That means mapping on Referata has a lot more options, and it’s already starting to bear fruit - check out the Google Earth option on Food Finds, for instance. Pretty nice!
• Sergey Chernyshev and I released a new version of Semantic Bundle, which now includes Maps and Semantic Maps, replacing Google Geocoder and SGM. It’s really the beginning of the end for SGM, not counting the 30+ wikis it’s already on…
• While working on the new Semantic Bundle version, I had the thought that SMW is starting to feel like a mature technology; in that it seems like the majority of the features that it will eventually have are already in place. The addition of the Semantic Maps extension had a lot to do with it, I think; this was one of the big chunks that I thought was still missing. There are still things left to be done, of course; I have a list of around 30, though they won’t necessarily be features that I implement. And I’m sure there will be various improvements behind the scenes, to speed up queries and the like. But I really feel like the Semantic MediaWiki system of the future won’t look all that different from what it looks like now, with the interplay of categories, templates, forms, properties, External Data calls, tables, maps, calendars, widgets, etc. (whew!) that you can already find in various SMW-based wikis. Though I could be wrong about this.

I’m pleased to announce my latest extension, Admin Links, released earlier today; which, depending on how you count it, is around my ninth extension (a number I never would have guessed I would reach). I believe this is my conceptually simplest extension yet: just a page of links that are meant to be helpful for administrators. I think that this helps fix a hole in MediaWiki, though: I wrote before that I thought one of the top weaknesses of MediaWiki compared to competing systems was “lack of guidance from the interface about how administrators should accomplish their tasks”. Other applications have wizards, control panels and the like for helping administrators do their daily tasks, but when you first set up MediaWiki, there’s nothing looking back at you but a blank main page, and lots of pages of documentation elsewhere. Admin Links provides the bare minimum, which is a page (at “Special:AdminLinks”) of links to common administrative tasks (like editing the CSS file, managing users, viewing a list of all the wiki’s pages). In addition, for administrators, it puts a link to this page within their “user links”, which are the links usually at the top of the page of “my talk”, “my preferences”, etc.; that way, an administrator can easily get to it from whatever page they happen to be on. Finally, Admin Links provides an API for letting other extensions add on sections and links to the page, so that Special:AdminLinks can always serve as a control panel for whatever set of extensions are installed. You can see an example of Admin Links at work here, on Discourse DB; though, since you’re not an administrator, you won’t see a link to it at the top. I’ve modified my local versions of the Semantic MediaWiki and Semantic Forms extensions to call the Admin Links API already, so you can see a lot of links geared for those two. I plan to check in the new Admin Links code of SMW and SF at some point soon, as well as to add similar calls to some of my other extensions.

The idea for this extension actually came from my wiki hosting site, Referata, which already has such a page for administrators (though there it’s called “Helpful links” - which will probably be replaced by Admin Links soon). And the idea for that, in turn, came because I realized the sheer volume of pages that people creating a Semantic MediaWiki site need to know about was making it hard for people to get started. So, in a very real sense, Admin Links is a Semantic MediaWiki-inspired extension; though of course it will most likely have usage beyond that. I should also note that it was the head of SMW, Markus Krötzsch, who came up with the insightful idea of implementing it as a general extension with an API, back when I discussed it with him a long while ago.

Jennifer Zaino at SemanticWeb.com was kind enough to interview me for an article about Referata and Semantic MediaWiki, and here it is: “Get Your MediaWiki Hosting Here”. I think it’s well-written and gives a nice overview of the site.

I got back a few weeks ago from the Web 3.0 conference in Santa Clara, California. I found the conference for the most part disappointing, and I think that was mostly caused, indirectly, by the conference’s name. It seems to have become conventional wisdom, over the last year or so, that “Web 3.0″ is a synonym of “Semantic Web”, and that’s fine with me - I think it makes a lot of sense. But now, what does “Semantic Web” mean? As I somewhat knew before, to a lot of people it means two things: the transfer of data among sites through APIs and protocols like RDF (the stuff I do); and the use of artificial intelligence and natural-language processing to try to understand the meaning behind text on the web. In this view of things, the term “linked data” covers the first of those meanings; I don’t know if there’s a term for just the second. In any case, at the Web 3.0 conference the two worlds coexisted, with the first one heavily dominating; for example, the two keynote speeches were given by Peer39 and Powerset, which are, respectively, an ad network and a search engine that do natural-language processing to get better results. I’m sure there’s a lot of usefulness in that kind of text processing, but it’s not relevant to anything I do, and it doesn’t interest me. So I unwittingly signed up for a conference mostly about the many applications of natural-language processing.

There were a few interesting parts: I had some nice conversations, and there were two strange coincidences: I saw a panel presentation by a guy I hadn’t seen since we were kids growing up in Amherst, Massachusetts; and another one by someone whose company was among the first customers of Referata. I got to talk to the first but unfortunately not the second. I also talked a little to the people from Freebase, who, it turns out, had never heard of me or of the world that’s sprung up around Semantic MediaWiki, but then again they’d have no reason to; $40 million in funding (or however much it was) can really help to focus your attention. I also spoke, at a panel on marketing, where I tried to stress the importance of selling to businesses and other organizations, using the tools of Web 3.0 as a solution for so-called “enterprise application integration”. I didn’t get the sense that there was a lot of interest in what I was saying, for whatever reason (maybe because most people were there for the text stuff). I sat next to Thomas Tague of OpenCalais, and I liked what he had to say. Two of his statements stuck with me: that all this semantic technology was probably not going to build a better Google, and more generally, that semantic-web startups seem to resemble 7-year-olds playing soccer: everyone just chases after whoever has the ball (in this case, Google, or maybe Powerset).

The trip itself wasn’t totally a waste: I stayed in San Francisco, with my brother and his family, including the few days before and after the conference. I had a very nice time catching up, and helping out with the kids. I also met up with a few friends of mine, including Nick Grandy, the guy I started Discourse DB with two years ago, who now has his own startup.
The experience may have soured me on business conferences; I guess the Linked Data Planet conference, organized by the same people (Jupiter Media), might be a better fit for me, since it’s more focused on the true-data side of things, as you could guess from the name. I might also end up at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose in June. That’s the big one, and it also seems more data-centric. At the last “SemTech” there were at least three presentations that mentioned Semantic MediaWiki: two that mentioned Semantic Forms specifically, one from the Halo developers, and another one that may have, since it included an SMW user on the panel. So my presence there this year would either be very appropriate or redundant.

I’ll be speaking at the Web 3.0 conference (”Semantic Web and Linked Data Business Strategies”) on October 16-17 in Santa Clara, CA. I’ll be on a panel about marketing, which should be quite interesting. Registration is still going on, if anyone has any interest in attending.

While we’re on the subject of news, I helped relaunch the Semantic Google Maps MediaWiki extension a few weeks ago, after it had gone unmaintained for a while; that included adding some new functionality, like being able to view multiple points on a single map. You can see a nice demonstration of the new Semantic Google Maps on the Food Finds wiki, which currently appears to be the most popular Referata wiki. It’s pretty neat how this mapping functionality works, giving people the ability to do “mashup”-style mappings of real data without the need to know anything about mapping APIs.

Here’s announcing the Semantic MediaWiki Community Wiki, released three days ago. In any software project, there’s a desire to use the software being created to serve the project’s own needs in some way (this is sometimes referred to in the corporate technology world as “eating your own dog food”, a terminology I’m not fond of), and this wiki finally serves that purpose for the Semantic MediaWiki project (semanticweb.org is also an SMW-based wiki, but it’s intended for the “semantic web” world in general, as opposed to just wikis). It contains data about wikis that use SMW and its various extensions, plus the users and administrators in the “community” (I think I can call it that). And one of the interesting things is, it only took five and a half hours from getting a subdomain for the site to sending out the announcement email about it - pretty sweet for a fully-structured, form-based site, I’d say. You can see here a drilldown interface, using Semantic Drilldown, showing the wikis that have been added so far.

I’m very pleased to announce the release of Referata, my Semantic MediaWiki-hosting site. Wikis on this site have usage of not just SMW but Semantic Forms, Semantic Drilldown, Semantic Calendar, Semantic Google Maps, Widgets and a variety of other helpful extensions that aren’t yet available on any other wiki hosting sites. This site thus is a technical, and also, I believe, a user-interface, pioneer, in that I think it’s the first site that lets users create a site with a well-supported data structure, that’s also world-editable. It’s also very easy to set up - someone who knows what they’re doing could create an entire site, with a set of interconnecting data types, in a few hours; trying to create that same set of functionality from scratch, using a web programming language like PHP or Ruby on Rails, could easily take a few months.

I’ve been working on this site for a long time (over a year, in one way or another), and I’m happy with the way it’s turned out. Basic usage of Referata is free; you can sign up and, within five minutes, have your own wiki that can become a collaborative database. There are two service levels that require payment: “Premium”, which costs $20 a month, lets you make your wiki private, so only members can read it, and “Enterprise”, which costs $250 a month and is geared to businesses, lets you set the look (”skin”) of the wiki and use a non-Referata domain as the site’s URL, among other bonus features.

As a side note, I’ve remarked before (in real life, not on this blog) that I don’t think that Semantic MediaWiki and the related extensions have gotten enough attention so far from the outside world, given what I consider their importance; they’ve been essentially ignored by the mainstream press, VCs (not that I’ve tried to contact any, but still), tech blogs and even, for the most part, the semantic-web-focused sites and blogs. One theory I have to explain is just the lack of a coherent name to refer to all of it: people need some kind of label to give to an entire set of functionality, and currently there’s no such thing. Even the name “Semantic MediaWiki” by itself is rather unwieldy, and that’s just one extension: it doesn’t include the main application (MediaWiki), plus the six or so other extensions that can be used in conjunction with it to create a fully structed site. Perhaps what has been needed is a focal point, with a clear name, that provides something tangible for people to look at; and maybe Referata is, as they say, the right candidate for the job.

If you’re curious about the site, feel free to create a wiki of your own; or you can just test things at the Scratchpad wiki, located at scratchpad.referata.com.