Semanticizing Wikipedia
On the follwing weekend there will be another interesting conference: ‘Wikimania 2005: The First International Wikimedia Conference.’ In Frankfurt, Germany, wikimedians from all over the world gather trying to figure out where their big thing and the related projects are heading. On Deutschlandfunk there was a small report (which unfortunately isn’t available online). It said that the conference is mainly going to touch three important issues: language, scaling, and the semantic web. Only the latter would already be reason enough to go to Frankfurt and listen to the talks, yet i will be off with Bubi to the Mediterranean coasts of Italy, France, and Spain. It seems that at least two talks of the semantic web series deserve closer attention. The first was a proposal for a semantic language that could be used within the Wikipedias: ‘WikiOnt: An Ontology for Describing and Exchanging Wiki Articles.’ The other looks like a proposal for enhancing wikilinks with some information on the semantic relation between the linked articles: ‘Wikipedia and the Semantic Web – The Missing Links’. While i haven’t read the articles — i still have to pack stuff for the trip — i am as noted before very excited about taking the Wikipedias onto another, specifically: a semantic, level. I will print out those proposals and read them during the trip.
