Hi David, > I think some kind of survey should be done to see what aspects of the > 'semantic web' people are interested in. We all know as a few-year project > intended to comprehensively remake the web SW failed, but it has many > significant aspects which are important in the long term that SMW purported > to support. A survey is good. I just started an "SMW Ontologies" thread that I hope can get to the heart of the matter, maybe revealing how much interest there is seeing SMW be the semantic web knowledge management tool it claims to want to be, or whether it's just an easier reporting engine for folks to prime & use. > Two in particular, are the cultivation of properties that can > be associated with any object and reliably reused across sites, as well as > the ability to query categories (eg query for 'politician' and receive back > all mayors, premiers, presidents, etc). I presume Cargo supports these > features within an SMW instance. Cargo doesnt support categories at all, to my knowledge. But maybe Cargo's plan envisions exposing MW's categorylinks table (amidst others) some day, I dunno. > Many users of SMW connect to science and health organizations, which do > today use what's now called "linked open data," which helps software > connect data in a rich way. Using this approach to data continues to be > important today to many practitioners. Many people dream about live data > reuse across sites without brittle arbitrary data transformation. LOD is sort of a list of principles; the Datacube ontology is a prime implementation built to exchange tabular (sql) data. > A major point of departure, and people are going to groan when I bring this > up, was SMW+. For political and technical reasons it caused a split in the > community and people's attitudes. On the one hand, it included very strong > UI features around class and property curation supporting consistency and > reuse, and supported or endeavored to support some important features SMW > doesn't have today. Technically Halo forked /both/ MW & SMW codebases, never unforking as they indicated they'd do -- a strategic blunder of great/sad consequence. Btw, I explicitly referencd re-using Halo code in the "SMW Ontologies" thread I started. > On the other hand it was unsustainable in relation to > main code because of its sometimes rough design as well as its dual open > source/commercial nature. I see this 'commercial' claim alot, and wonder where it comes from. We all (Yaron included!) have a 'commercial' reqt to survive, so I dont see the problem. The only thing commercial about it was/are the support contracts DIQA offers, no harm in that I think. > This is what I think John is focusing on, trying to recreate SMW+ in an > open source way. And at SMWCon Spring 2013 many people seemed interested in > this idea. However without mainstream support that's a very difficult > project. And I'm sure it's very frustrating to see SW features dropped as a > topic altogether. My focus is to use & improve SMW as a semantic web knowledge management tool; SMW+ has code we can re-use, is all I care about, to achieve this goal. To this end I suggested half a dozen ways how to leverage Cargo within SMW, so you understand how agnostic I am about where code comes from. > However, as has been pointed out, Yaron has absolutely no reason within > this great open source culture to do anything but develop code that suits > his purposes and views. He produces and supports an important stack of > software, and takes a very reasonable, practical approach to the uses of > SMW that works well for many people. Completely agree, and I echo every word. > I definitely think John overreacted and should apologize. I want to be clear that I did express an apology on-list for any mistakes I've made explaining my views. I privately exchanged emails with Yaron on this too and don't know what else y'all want me to do now. > Otherwise, I > wonder if this event can be used to make a stronger general product, for > example to pull out the important features within SMW that are supported by > Cargo and the triplestore, and might in the future support more coherent > class development and content curation with front-end tools (which I'd love > to work on, but have held back because of perceptions around the base > code). Some kind of vision of how Wikipedia/Mediawiki, an SMW site, and > WikiData/WikiBase all connect would be an informative project. If a table > of connection points and software tests were included it might support a > practical way forward for the SMW community. > > David
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