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.
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Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an extension of MediaWiki with semantic technology. Not only users can create and edit Wiki pages, but also they can make semantic assertions. SMW allows users to annotate Wiki contents using various types of knowledge representation constructs.

In this post, I overview the basic features of SMW and show its usage with few simple examples. At the end, I show how semantically annotated Wiki knowledge can be used to enable structured search queries, which are more expressive than the typical free-text search (e.g., Google web search).

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