Bruce Whealton: Career, Interests and Values

This is quite an honor

There are many very talented web developers and web development teams that write applications that use these cutting edge technologies.  I was working alone with a vision in mind and an idea.  MediaWiki is the same software that runs Wikipedia.org the very popular online encyclopedia.   However a wiki can be used for anything.  Wiki comes from an Hawaiian word meaning quick.  On Wikipedia one can edit almost any page (the exception being protected pages) without logging into the site.  Or one can login and create or edit articles.  Once you save your page it is immediately available on the internet.  So, it is the quickest and easiest way to publish a web page or web content. 

There are also some very simple formatting instructions or codes you can use to present your article or page.  For example to make something a header you would surround it with one, two, three or four equal signs, like this ==My Level 2 Heading== where two == signs gives a level 2, one equal sign use a level one header and usually isn’t used because the title of the article on the page uses that level of heading, so it is reserved.  There are many other editing markers that you can use and they are easy to find by doing a search for “edit mediawiki article” on a mediawiki wiki or on google or bing.

So, what is Semantic MediaWiki?  I did say that my wiki was being recognized as the Semantic MediaWiki site of the month.  This involves extensions to the software to allow a MediaWiki to become a Semantic Website or to enable many features of the Semantic Web.  Some of these features may not seem all that useful if one doesn’t have any idea how this Semantic Data or information can be used on the Semantic Web, outside of what we are doing on our own website.  The Semantic Web does create open-linked data/information that can be accessed, or queried across the world wide web.  That is why they call it a global database. 

In my wiki sites, which are about genealogy, I used some extensions that allow forms to be created for entering information into the website.  Behind the scenes and hidden from the user is the code that gives meaning to this data or information that you enter into the form, meaning that can be used by machines or software.  So, on a genealogy website, when you enter information about a person, you would want to list, spouse, father, mother, children, ancestors, and etc.  Think of these as properties.  You might want to ask who was John Smith’s wife back in 1850?  If someone entered that information into the form, the software would have that encoded so that later this question can be asked.

The sites I produced are here: “Whealton Family Genealogy”: http://whealton.info/w/ and “My Family Lineage”: http://my-family-lineage.com/w/

Continuing, a Semantic web application allows questions to be asked later that were not originally considered when the application was created.  This is very new.  It also allows for a standard way of defining terms, or meaning in different knowledge areas, or areas of discussion.  For example, I you were talking about who you know and what you do on the internet you would use the FOAF vocabulary – Friend of a Friend.  Of course, these vocabularies must be defined somewhere.  FOAF is defined or specified here.  In the context of Genealogy, two other important vocabularies can be used, “BIO: A vocabulary for biographical information” which is defined here and “RELATIONSHIP: A vocabulary for describing relationships between people” which is defined here. 

My two wikis use forms so that when you enter the name of a spouse, or father, or mother, the values are matched up with these vocabularies.  This is an important way to define terms in a way that can be “understood” by computers.  Software or computers can use this information contained in the vocabularies to understand, as it were, how terms relate to each other.  Previously, computers had no idea what these terms meant or how they relate to other terms.  Even when you were asking Google natural language type questions and it seemed that Google understood, it was only using pattern matching and the fact that two or more words appeared on the page together.