[hackerspaces] Interconnecting Semantic Media Wikis (HSF round-table topic)

[Bartosz Kostrzewa]

Hi everyone,

as was discussed in Paris it would be interesting to interconnect our
wikis to make information sharing simple while not requiring a
centralized system.

Semantic Media Wiki (SMW) allows just that. Another wiki can either send
a request for [CSV, JSON, RDF] data for a specific SWM query and use it
on a page using the External Data extension
(http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:MediaWiki_extensions#External_Data)
or alternatively the source wiki could simply provide a CSV of its
semantic data to be imported by another wiki on a regular basis.

I suppose an appropriate place for this would be hackerspaces.org. I can
think of about 5 steps to get this working:

1) decide on which content should be shared through this method (I
believe events and projects would be sufficient)

2) establish a standard set of Categories, Subcategories and
SubSubCategories across hackerspace wikis, write down this standard
somewhere

3) Implement SMW on all wikis that want to participate

4) decide on one of two modes of operation (direct queries are realtime,
but will produce higher bandwidth requirements and significant
connection overhead for each query)

5) decide on a location for displaying this information (hackerspaces.org ?)

Notes:
2) (sub)subcategories: during the round-table someone mentioned that
they would be interested in having digests in a given field because they
feel overwhelmed in filtering all the cruft that does not interest them
from project lists, something like: Category:Projects,
Subcategory:Hardware, SubSubCategory:Embedded... This way the "PROJECTS
FROM ALL HACKERSPACES" page can be organized into sections.

I'm not sure whether SMW objects can be assigned multiple tags from the
same group at once (ie two subcategories for instance) Another question
is whether to display such overlapping projects multiple times on the
page, once for each query they fit.

-Bartek