Here are testimonials from some of the users of Semantic MediaWiki and its related extensions.
Semantic MediaWiki, along with its related extensions, is providing a collaborative solution for an improved enrollment, school and district guide. While educators focus on student learning, it's important for school communications teams to facilitate powerful ways in which to help their families learn more about their children's opportunities. In many ways, we're educators, too. SMW is helping us better serve information to search engines, compile standardized content using forms and present maps of our schools, as well as better organize, display and print data about our faculty, schools and courses.
Dustin Senger, Digital Communications Specialist, Falcon School District 49
We needed a test case management system that would be easy to set up and modify, usable by a brand-new team of volunteer novice testers, and with the capacity to rapidly create custom reports as developers demanded them. SMW and Semantic Forms fit the bill. The flexibility of our system allowed us to adapt to our many changing needs as we prepared to ship software to half a million schoolchildren in the developing world. I've since gone and helped other software projects implement similar setups because of the ease with which you can prototype designs in SMW.
Mel Chua, QA Community Lead 2008-2009, One Laptop Per Child
SMW has provided our clients a flexible system to view, store, and edit their story data. What has been amazing is that the system is truly extensible, allowing updates and changes whenever the need arises. What's great is that by defining the structure of the data in the SMW, you get an admin interface to edit that data for free. We also export the story data for uses at our client sites, which can be updated whenever the data changes. It's a great solution.
Phillip Tiongson, Principal, Potion Design
SMW is best of breed: open source with a very active community, bringing together Web 2.0 (wikis) with the Semantic Web, thus contributing to the emerging Social Semantic Web. An ideal mix to combine the textual power of wikis with features of online databases and semantics.
Bernhard Krabina, KM-A Knowledge Management Associates
A manufacturing plant can be a complex environment. We have used Semantic Mediawiki to establish flexible workflows and information resources that allow elevation of critical discussion and decision making. Steadily growing since 2009, a brief overview presentation of a FEW of the things we are using it for is available here. Some of these items include elements as below:
- An equipment isolation procedure module (Lock Out Tag Out) that structures creation, approval, and display of procedures.
- Establishment and display of statistical 'Control Charts' using data from our the industrial computers.
- Useful 'Dashboards' of important live information about processes in the plant.
- Calculation and display of 'Key Performance Indicators' (KPI's) and visualizations across the site.
- Electronic checklists and log sheets that free us from shuttling (sometimes losing) physical papers around all day and make auditing a pleasure.
- Management of activity oriented content articles where we describe efforts or ideas and document their progress or status. Elements include:
- Scaled risk assessment (what should we be doing?)
- Effort alignment (why are we doing this?)
- Resource allocation (who will do it?)
- Cost Savings Reporting (what is the activity worth?)
- Task lists
- Schedules, gantt charts
- Documentation of internal auditing activities that drive corrective action resolution and management KPI's.
- Taking of meeting minutes where users are identified specifically as participants, dates, related action item articles, and departments.
- Event calendars to drive communication of plant activities.
- Traceability logs identifying what products/packaging was reprocessed, when, by who, and how much. Drives dynamic reporting on costs to the business and makes auditing a snap.
- Equipment information. While our ERP system handles the dollars and cents, Semantic Mediawiki allows for a human component. For documentation of important information related to 1000's of pieces of equipment and the expedited access to it.
- Caching of and display of wiki-computed KPI's like Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)
The project itself has been very rewarding and we've come across few problems that can't be solved with a form, template, and a few articles.
Lucas Billett, Mechanical Engineer, Food Ingredients Manufacturing
We started looking into Semantic MediaWiki as a knowledge base system about a year ago and were so successful with it after just a few months that we never looked back. It provided us with both flexibility and ease of use and allowed us to develop several applications within the same wiki:
- An IT systems portfolio management (inventory)
- A Configuration management for these systems (components and relationships)
- A Communication component (calendar / timeline of announcements, outages and training sessions)
- A Request tracking (tickets)
- A Question tracking (similar to WikiAnswers)
- A Logging mechanism (to track events, outages related to our systems)
- A Service Account Password expiration management (with notification by RSS and Outlook)
- Semantic / faceted search results
- A Map of our locations (with built-in form to Google Directions)
- A Self service help system (knowledge base of solutions)
- And an Advanced glossary (terms organized by domains, with synonyms, related terms, etc)
Usually, these would have required the purchase of several tools, with different licensing schemes, and the development of a lot of integration software to make them work together. All these tools only required a little bit of training and about 25% of the time of a single developer for a year, on a single, low cost platform.
Laurent Alquier, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development, LLC
I am a nurse working in research at Duke University. I work specifically in hematology looking at genetics, psychosocial, clinical, and research laboratory data as they relate to sickle cell disease. Moreover, I work in psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. My data-related work involves gathering, organizing, analyzing and reporting data. Both at UNC and at Duke my interest involves diseases that have a very small population. Hence, data is precious and funds are few. Without a doubt, Semantic MediaWiki coupled with the Semantic Forms, Header Tabs, Data Transfer, and recently Semantic Result Formats, and SRF Ploticus, in particular, is the most comprehensive, and the best integration of IT applications that I have seen to fit what we do here.
Jude Jonassaint, Duke University Medical Center
I built a dynamic character sheet for the players of my game, in MediaWiki. It's been a breeze to maintain and update, I've got almost 200 pages or so feeding data into a single page through semantic data. It's a very powerful extension and I only wish all wikis had this kind of functionality.
Brendan Crosser-McGay
SNPedia was built on MediaWiki long before we knew about Semantic MediaWiki. In the beginning, the most common question was "How many SNPs are in SNPedia?", and with Semantic MediaWiki we were immediately able to answer that question and always be up to date. Since then we've found dozens of other ways to use it for more complicated kinds of dynamic content. Now relevant information finds the user, instead of the reverse, and users see immediate benefits from populating structured content. This makes the site more useful for programs, which in turn are used to improve the site for humans. Semantic MediaWiki helps to create the virtuous circle which continually improves the site.
Mike Cariaso, SNPedia
Semantic Mediawiki solves many problems for those I work with, from hard science to non-profit arts groups. It carries forward the potential transparency and access of wikis, but makes pages easier to create, organize and access via forms, and includes many helpful interactive views generated through fine data-reuse. Even without using the future-facing semantic facilities, it's fantastic software, with a friendly, professional community and brilliant insight in its development.
I started to use Semantic MediaWiki after I saw automated timeline created using data from the regular wiki, this changed my perspective on collaborative data creation. I've built TechPresentations using Semantic MediaWiki and beyond collaboration, it was the only way for me to maintain the site because of flexibility MediaWiki provided and data reuse that Semantic MediaWiki added on top of that. I also run a few other wiki-based sites and always use Semantic MediaWiki for data management - when you use Semantic MediaWiki and related extensions, you own your data and not only web pages.
Sergey Chernyshev, TechPresentations
Swiss Experiment or SwissEx is an attempt to enable effective real-time environmental monitoring through wireless sensor networks. Our teams are constantly using features of Semantic Mediawiki to create new semantic web pages with sensor metadata, display them on maps and graphs, manage and change them easily, and last but not least efficiently search and query them. Semantic Mediawiki offered all the support, technology and features in order today for Swiss Experiment to be a wiki with thousands of semantic metadata pages available to researchers worldwide.
Ioannis Paparrizos, Research Assistant, Swiss Experiment Project
As a directory of dating spots, mikomos.com needed an easy way for users to find the very specific type of place they needed. Semantic Mediawiki as well as Semantic Google Maps provided an easy way for our users to find these places in the location they were looking, as well as other places nearby. As they are not technically apt, it would be impossible for them to contribute without the help of Semantic Forms. Without these extensions we would have no users and no content. Thanks to all those involved!
Issac @ Tosfos Development
More testimonials are welcome. To contribute your own, please send one to testimonials.
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