Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Recently I learned about Centiare from Gregory Kohs, a co-developer of the application. Centiare is a new Wiki application that builds on the Semantic MediaWiki features.

Centiare is a unique online reference directory that anyone can use. You can set up your very own Directory page about yourself or your business, and no other users can edit it. That’s how the Directory pages work — if you create it, you own it.

[Y]ou’re encouraged to express advocate points-of-view (APOV); include links to your products, artwork, blogs, or books you’ve written; and create wiki-links to any other pages in Centiare that you find interesting.

Centiare differs from other community-based Wiki sites in several ways.

First, Centiare is built around a fairly convincing business model — to attract more users by offering services and features that are not welcomed by the existing Wiki sites. For example, Centiare allows users to monetize their wiki postings (e.g., plug in Google Ads) as long as they don’t diminish the value of Centiare to other users. Users can also upload videos files, documents etc. Users can post YouTube videos in wiki pages. They can also use Centiare to promote their resumes, auctions and products.

Second, Centiare empowers advanced Wiki users with semantic tagging and semantic query features. Users can annotate Wiki links with special prefix tags to describe relations and attributes (see examples). Pages that are semantically tagged can then be searched by semantic query expressions. Users can ask questions like “What geographical entities are located between the 39th and 40th parallels?” (see example).

Third, Centiare offers a higher degree of authenticity among the users and gives users more control over the contents that they “own”. Centiare users must not register accounts with “disposable” email addresses (e.g. gmail.com, yahoo! mail). Registered users “own” the Centiare Wiki pages that they create. Users are welcomed to express opinions and not necessary unbiased true facts in their wiki pages — similar philosophy is also adopted by Wikia.

Here are few useful entry points to learn about Centiare:

• What’s Centiare?
• Introduction to Centiare by Gregory Kohs (3-page presentation)
• Semantic tagging, the ASK query, semantic search facility