Semantic MediaWiki Community Portal

Welcome to the community portal.
This is the place for general inquiries, your ideas or comments concerning this very wiki. Here you may get in touch with one of the administrators of this wiki, who also use this portal as a noticeboard.

If you are looking for support with a problem about the software itself, please have a look at the info page on getting support.

I've just set up mediawiki and smw - using the git bleeding edge versions. I'm using postgres as the database backend. I encountered multiple problems while attempting to run the SMW_setup.php script ... but eventually, I found some obvious bugs and eventually I managed to get it running. How do I submit patches?

Tobixen (talk)

The best way to do this is to file the patch at MediaWiki's bugtracking system GitHub. Thank you for working on this! Cheers

[[kgh]] (talk)

The content of <pre> doesn't support wrap. Anything of the paragraph will be displayed in one line. Suggest adding pre{white-space:pre-wrap} to MediaWiki:common.css or so. (My English is poor.)

SolidBlock (talk)

I need to create a graph with the Graphviz extension, in which the node is filled with an image. "Image" is used as an attribute in a "node" definition. An example is found here: http://www.graphviz.org/content/kennedyanc. However, that example does not run on MediaWiki, which has a different way to store images. That could be a problem. According to the extension description at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GraphViz, a restriction states that "Any image attribute values are required to be the names of uploaded files". Okay... but whatever I do, just the filename, or the full link to the file in the images folder, it doesn't work. The system error message is "The dot image attribute must be the name of an uploaded file". Has anyone worked with this and found a solution?

Peter Woudsma (talk)

http://wiki.bitplan.com/index.php/SimpleGraphModuleHubAndSpoke has an example e.g.

SMW [  URL="[[SimpleGraph-SMW]]" label=""  image="SemanticMediaWiki Logo.png" ]

Wolfgang Fahl (talk)

Please, give me permission for translation.

</>Rul1902</> (talk)

Done. Will you be translating for "kjp" or "my" or both? Consider also translating the software itself at translatewiki.net

Cheers

[[kgh]] (talk)

Both! Thx a lot, for your information.

Rul1902 (talk)

In the navigation menu (MediaWiki:Sidebar) is a link to MediaWiki, included under Users, Administrators and Developers. It links directly to the MediaWiki start page mediawiki.org. Besides being repetitive (3 times) I don't think it's good practice to lead away from the website in the main navigation, since it's surprising, unexpected and lacking context. Maybe a short subpage about MediaWiki including the link and added under General would work better? The same applies to a link to OSDA under General.

Sabine Melnicki (talk)

I did not see your post till now. Sorry for the delay in answering and thank you for your suggestions.

> Besides being repetitive (3 times)

I believe that if you know what you are there is a high chance that you will not have a look at the other menus. Spares us from providing a single menu with 20+ selection items.

> I don't think it's good practice to lead away from the website in the main navigation

I have never thought about this but you may very well be right. Just changed to internal landing pages before the people can head of to ... :)

[[kgh]] (talk)

I feel like I'm missing something obvious here, but I do not understand how to select pages with #ask where a property with multiple values shouldn't have a certain value.

I'll just use the demo pages here for an example:

{{#ask: [[Located in::Europe]] [[Located in::!Europe]] }}

It seems to me like this query should select nothing, but it it renders England, due to that page's "Located in" property having multiple values, both Europe and United Kingdom. (According to the definition of the ! operator, this is technically the expected behavior, i.e. England is a page that does have a value other than Europe for it's "Located in" property.)

So the use case I have is a property where the values do not even have a hierarchical relationship. For example, let's assume we have pages with a "Has colors" property that can have more than one value of red, green, blue, etc. How would I go about selecting pages that are not red?

Blackice (talk)

Just exclude red:

{{#ask: [[Has colors::!red]] }}

This query will list all pages holding the "Has colors" property but without red as the annotated value. See also this example.

[[kgh]] (talk)

Ok, so it turns out that things are not so easy as they appear. Currently it depends on the data backend used which results you will be getting. The example page used uses the supplementary "SMWElasticStore" backend which will be available with SMW 3.0. Here you are getting the result as shown, whereas if you are using the "SMWSQLStore3" backend it indeed turns out that it is not possible this way. So you have to apply some tricks, e.g. adding a (hidden) category called e.g. "Has colors red" or better model a different data structure with using sub-properties like "Has colors red" both allowing for direct selection for querying. I must note that you do not necessarily have do set up this extra property as a sub-property.

[[kgh]] (talk)

Hello,

at the moment i have to bring a pretty big class hierarchy from a .owl document to my SMW. I have been searching for quite a long time on how to do this, but i have seen that there is no way of a direct "import.

In order to do this, my idea is creating a document which makes something like this:

//Category declaration

Category: catego2 . . . . Category: catego950

This is easy, and will allow me to create all categories, problem is that they need to be organized in a hierarchy.

For this i would need something like

catego1 subCategoryOf: catego2

You know, without having to enter the category (in this example catego1) each time, as there is a pretty long way to go.

Any clue on how to do this? Did not found nothing on how to do that.

Maiser (talk)

I've just started looking at Semantic Mediawiki. I'm an experienced Wikipedia editor and also have a lot of experience developing OWL ontologies in Protege. I'm looking at various tools for a project to create a semantic knowledge portal for a set of related topics in cognitive science for a non-profit. We have a budget so I could use a commercial tool, I'm looking at Pool Party and Open Calais as well. I'm pretty technical but more at the level of OWL and logic and editing Wikipedia rather than setting up and configuring servers. I'll have a team to do this eventually but right now I'm in the really early stages of evaluating various tool options so I want to do as much as I can to get a feel for SMW just using the Sandbox. I just wanted to give that as background. So my questions are: 1) How much can I do working in the Sandbox? I noticed some extensions that seem like they would be useful. Especially the extension to create custom forms but I'm sure there are others. The Forms extension is a zip download. Can I download that and use it with my Sandbox or can I only download that (and other extensions) into an environment where I have my own server? 2) I've heard a lot about Dublin Core and it seems like the right model to use for things like books, journal articles, videos, etc. to store all the metadata (authors, date created, publisher, etc.) about them. That seems like such a common possible requirement I was wondering is there any way to load a vocabulary for Dublin Core into my Sandbox environment (or do people recommend a different vocabulary or different way to store such metadata?) 3) As I said I've developed several ontologies in OWL using Protege and also using the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). Ideally, I would like to develop an ontology and import it into my SMW environment. Is that possible? I'm guessing not from my preliminary look it seems like the number of OWL like capabilities that are supported is pretty small. Just inverses, subclasses, but not things like transitive properties, DL definitions for classes much less SWRL rules. It's not a deal killer if this isn't supported but I just wanted to double check to make sure I'm understanding things correctly. But even if I can't take advantage of SWRL I would still like to load OWL ontologies. Again wondering if that can be done with a Sandbox environment or if it requires I set up a server.

MDeBellis (talk)

> 1) How much can I do working in the Sandbox? I noticed some extensions that seem like they would be useful.

Do you mean [0] or do you want to build your own sandbox? In the latter case you have to follow the installation instruction from SMW and any of the extension you want to use in addition.

If you are unfamiliar with the technical management of MediaWiki but eager to evaluate whether SMW can provide the environment you are looking for or not then I would suggest you use [0] as test environment. We provide [0] for users who want to try out SMW or evaluate new features we develop with newer SMW releases therefore [0] runs with a higher version.

> 2) I've heard a lot about Dublin Core and it seems like the right model to use for things like books, journal articles, videos, etc. to store all the metadata (authors, date created, publisher, etc.) about them. That seems like such a common possible requirement I was wondering is there any way to load a vocabulary for Dublin Core into my Sandbox environment

Since we are rely on MediaWiki we have to account for the management of those data in certain ways (different from what you are use to in comparison to Protege). Importing vocabulary provides an introduction on how external vocabularies can be imported with [2, 3, 4, 5] containing some definition examples for the DC/FOAF/DWC namespace.

> 3) As I said I've developed several ontologies in OWL using Protege and also using the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). Ideally, I would like to develop an ontology and import it into my SMW environment. Is that possible?

Depending on the features you used for the ontology, that should be possible except for SWRL related elements. See above about the importing of vocabularies.

> Just inverses, subclasses, but not things like transitive properties, DL definitions for classes much less SWRL rules. It's not a deal killer if this isn't supported but I just wanted to double check to make sure I'm understanding things correctly.

Yes, transitive properties are not supported as that would require a reasoner which is not part of SMW core. If you are using a SPARQL instance as query backend that you may query instances that rely on a reasoner [7] in connection with a selected triple store.

> I would still like to load OWL ontologies. Again wondering if that can be done with a Sandbox environment

As I said above, try using [0] first before starting your own server so that you can get a feel for the environment and see whether it fits your expectation or not.

We deploy some standard vocabularies with each installation to make it easier for users to start reusing them where they see fit.

I hope this answers some of your questions, in regards to SMW and while less directed towards ontologies and OWL, the following video playlist [8, 9] may give an insight as to what and how SMW works.

> portal for a set of related topics in cognitive science for a non-profit. We have a budget so I could use a commercial tool, I'm looking at Pool Party and Open Calais as well. I'm pretty technical but more at the level of OWL and

If the project somehow doesn't meet your expectation maybe you can tell us about those shortcomings so that we may take them into account for future refinements.

• [0] https://sandbox.semantic-mediawiki.org
• [1] https://sandbox.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Sp%C3%A9cial:Version
• [2] https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Property:Dc:identifier
• [3] https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Property:Foaf:knows
• [4] https://sandbox.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Attribut:Dwc:kingdom
• [5] https://terms.tdwg.org/wiki/dwc:kingdom
• [6] https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Transitive_relationships
• [7] https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/isg/people/yujiao.zhou/aaai2014/paper.pdf
• [8] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIJ9eX-UsA5cQY7T0ZmLI2ASdea3ffrvG
• [9] https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=ZsNMFpNfUdE

James Hong Kong (talk)

Thanks for that very detailed and informative reply. This is such an amazing resource.

MDeBellis (talk)

Hi everyone,

I am translating and reviewing what it is already translated to Spanish in TranslateWiki. I continue translating but at this moment I have doubts with the internal links to the special pages. Must I have translate the internal links? An example:

[[Special:Types/Date|type]] » [[Especial:Tipos/Fecha|tipo]]

I think the correct should be translate them, because each system have a language configured and because, at least in my SMW version (2.5.5) and in the case of the special pages for types, if the links are in English, the base page (Types/Tipos) is translated, but the subpage for each type is not translated, I mean, if you link to Special:Types/Date the URL will be Especial:Tipos/Date and the display title "Date", it doesn't redirect to Especial:Tipos/Fecha, however it exists. Maybe the English title could be a redirection and not the same page than the other language, I think to have the same content in both pages could be unnecessary use of resources, when the only difference is the display title.

In TranslateWiki I have translated some of this links because I checked in my SMW local installation that it works fine, but in some cases I have not translated because I receive a warning notice that says literally "Following link is missing: [[Special:Types/Boolean|type]]".

What is the correct way to translate this internal links? What do you think about my proposal about the dual names? I only have experimented this with the Special:Types/*, so I have to review the rest of the translation.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Regards

Iván Hernández-Cazorla (talk)

Here you have an example for the first example that I gave (Special:Types/*). I forgot to share a string as example in the post, excuse me.

Regards

Iván Hernández-Cazorla (talk)

Thanks a lot for bringing this up and remind me of a task I should have done long ago! Shame on me! The links should indeed be translated too for best experience. Translatewiki.net configuration has to be changed to stop the link checks you are referring to and thus allowing to translate. I will author the change and give you a note here as soon as it is doen.

[[kgh]] (talk)

I have now authored the configuration change. From experience this should not take long to be merged.

[[kgh]] (talk)

Oh, it seems that I reply to you practically at the same time you post your note. Fine! When it will be updated, I will make the respective changes.

Thanks a lot!

Iván Hernández-Cazorla (talk)

Don't worry, Karsten! There is many things to do and it is normal that we forgive something and enter in a loop of oversight things hehe, it also happens to me. Just a note, it also should change too in the strings in which is [[Property:*]] or similar links.

All right, I will be awaiting for your note here. Don't be hurried!

Iván Hernández-Cazorla (talk)

Yeah, included them at the same time. :)

[[kgh]] (talk)

Karsten, I checked if it was merged successfully and yes, it was merged, but in TranslateWiki there is errors yet. I made a Ctrl + Shif + R, but the errors persist.

Regards

Iván Hernández-Cazorla (talk)

Hi, I'm currently trying to get rid of special property "Has query", as my wiki generated hundreds of thousands of those for which I have no use, and making my semantic store very difficult to refresh. Any clue?

Steph (talk)

See $smwgQueryProfiler for how to do it.

[[kgh]] (talk)

Worked! Thx a lot.

Steph (talk)

Wow. What a downer, although not completely unexpected I must say.

For ones I made the general exception to fill in some survey. In this case the SMW survey (link at top of this page(Removed, until re-added))

So I filled in the questions (nothing general good toward SMW's documentation or communications levels).

And after that I hit the save button on the survey form.

... nothing seemed to happen.

... maybe I miss clicked. So I click it again.

... still nothing that re-samples some action feedback.

... 3th time is a charm of course. Still nothing ... ok, fine by me.

Guess SMW is not aware of the general rule that proper feedback on an action is essential in letting the user(or whatever other system for that matter) know its action was detected.

O well. I guess that was the last survey I ever spend my time on (for real, although I'm of course the only one that knows I'll truly stick to that.)

... Science is not the only area where bad apples generate some ripple effect (usually initiated by some butterfly flapping its wings). ...

MvGulik (talk)

I can understand your frustration and I am sorry for this. I was not aware that the survey offered was broken so thank you for reporting it. I now removed it until it was fixed to prevent others from running into the issue you experienced.

[[kgh]] (talk)

Hi everyone,

Today I am nosy hehe. Translating SMW I have another doubt, in addition to my last thread opened. The string in question is:

"Unable to interpret a prehistoric "$1" input value. For example, having specified more than years or a calendar model may return unexpected results in a prehistoric context" (link to TranslateWiki).

I would like to know what is the meaning of "prehistoric" in this case to know if I translated it fine, or if there is another word in Spanish for that sense. In Spanish, "prehistoric" is "prehistórico/a" and has two meanings:

1. Part of or related with a period studied by the Prehistory.
2. Antiquated, old.

If "prehistoric" in the context of a datatype refers to antiquated or old, in Spanish I suggest to use "anticuado". Is it refers to any of those meanings?

Thanks in advance!

Regards

Iván Hernández-Cazorla (talk)

> I would like to know what is the meaning of "prehistoric"

Please see [0], hope this clarifies the context.

[0] https://github.com/SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticMediaWiki/blob/master/includes/dataitems/SMW_DI_Time.php#L37-L41

James Hong Kong (talk)

Surly ante-diluvian dates. :) I just expanded the message docu. Thanks for asking!

[[kgh]] (talk)

Thank you, mwjames and Karsten Hoffmeyer! Now I have clear the concept. I added a specification with the year from which a context is considered "prehistoric", I say in a parentheses at the end of the sentence "previous to year 10000", in Spanish "anterior al año 10000". Although as historian I could debate it hahaha. It is a joke, I understand that it is a concept to understand this limitation.

Regards

Iván Hernández-Cazorla (talk)

Hi everyone,

I am translating the system messages in Translatewiki.net to Spanish. During the translation I found an error in English that I want to share with you here to be fixed. It is not a serious error, only a typo error: catagorized, must be categorized.

If I find more errors, I will notice you here. If you prefer that I report it in the mailing list or wherever you think more appropiate, tell me and I will do it.

Regards

Iván Hernández-Cazorla (talk)

Thanks for reporting the typo. Apparently I have no idea where you found the typo. In case you cannot correct the typo yourself please also indicate the whereabouts of the typo. In case you are able to correct the typo yourself you are most welcome to do so. Thanks also for you effort on this wiki.

[[kgh]] (talk)

Ah, now I got it. Yeah, found the typo and fixed it. I will be great if you could specify the respective system message for faster detection. Thanks a lot for noticing!

[[kgh]] (talk)

Excuse me, kgh! I thought that I link where I found the typo error.

Iván Hernández-Cazorla (talk)

No worries. All is fine now. :)

[[kgh]] (talk)

Hi everyone!

I am always reading the documentation and I have been able to check that it isn't in Spanish mostly. I like very much to help with translations and, in this case, I think I can collaborate with this project in this way.

Many pages there isn't marked for translations, so I need the permissions to make it. Then I would translate each page that I marked.

If you need to check that I know how works the translation tools of MediaWiki, you can check my contributions in the translations namespace of Wikidata.

I await your answer!

Regards, Iván Hernández-Cazorla (talk) 17:28, 9 December 2017 (CET)

Iván Hernández-Cazorla (talk)

Thanks a lot for wanting to contribute translations. I just made you a translator. There are still quite a lot of messages marked for translation which are not translated (see the stats for es). The reason why a lot of pages are not marked for translation is that the docu is currently being reworked completely. However datatypes and configuration parameters are mostly ready to go. So I will prioritize creating the translation template. After that was done you could work your way through them if you like.

[[kgh]] (talk)

One thing that is even more a priority is to translate the system messages. There are still a lot to be done on translatewiki.net. See here. Moreover related semantic extensions are lacking translations, too. Doing them will be very much appreciated, too.

[[kgh]] (talk)

Hi User:kghbln!

Thank you to you for granted me the permissions! Yes, there is a lot of pages marked for translations but no translated. I check and translate it bit by bit as the time allows me. I am agree with your way to work, I will prioritize the translation template and the pages marked. If I check some page that could be marked and translated because possibly it will never have important changes, I will do it too.

About the system messages, all right. I will try to help with that too. One doubt about semantic extensions, is there any centralized website in which I can work its translations? Or, have I check for each case?

Ah! Excuse me for the double signature in my last messages. I usually write in the Wikipedia talk pages, where is not able any system like this or Flow yet.

Regards

Iván Hernández-Cazorla (talk)

Hi Ivanhercaz,

thanks a lot for you effort. You approach sounds reasonable. Indeed, pages already marked for translation are priority. In case there is something to ask do so ...

The individual semantic extensions for translating the system messages can be chosen from the dropdown menu on this page, so yes there is a centralized website to do so. This one uses the same translating system as this wiki and most of the other websites running MediaWiki.

Do not worry about signatures. :)

[[kgh]] (talk)

Why not link to Help:Semantic_MediaWiki_extensions (and Help:MediaWiki_extensions) from the text "spinoff extensions" (on the start page)? Just a suggestion.

Sabine Melnicki (talk)

Thanks for the suggestion, however I have the feeling that this should actually be do. However, I need to work on the respective page to make it better.

[[kgh]] (talk)

Hi there

I am working on translation here. Spanish.

I wonder if there are any best practices stablished for the use of "tu" or "usted".

Any ideas o criteria?

Thanks

Amglez (talk)

I actually to not know what "tu" or "usted" mean. If this refers to formal or informal versions of the English word "you" when use whatever is generally more appropriate in Spanish regarding this websites audience. I trust that you will make the best choice. :)

[[kgh]] (talk)

Yes, that is.

Ok, thinking of my american readers I decided to choose the formal version. As this is an English resource it is dificult for me but I suppose it is better to be too polite than making anybody unconfortable.

Thanks a lot.

Amglez (talk)

Good thinking. I agree. Thanks for you help!

[[kgh]] (talk)

Hi there

The translation app ( semantic-mediawiki.org:Translating content ) took me to Creating semantic-mediawiki.org:Translator when I asked permission to begin translating.

Sorry, I do not know what I am expected to do.

Help?

Amglez (talk)

Sure, you are now a translator. Now you should be able to use the translation feature. Thank you for your involvement! Cheers

[[kgh]] (talk)

:-)

Amglez (talk)

I've just translated Main Page to Greek language (el): Σημασιολογικό MediaWiki and also uploaded Greek flag:

Can someone please add:

span.lang-el {
	padding-right: 25px;
	background: url(images/5/5d/Lang-el.png) center right no-repeat;
}

to MediaWiki:Common.css so as for the flag to show on the language template?

Or maybe give me the appropriate rights to do it myself.

Thanks!

Ioannis Protonotarios (talk)

Done!

[[kgh]] (talk)