Use Semantic Mediawiki & Semantic Forms to Create a Folksonomy for Tagging Related Pages

At work we use Semantic Mediawiki to augment an internal wiki running on Mediawiki. It’s used to house anything from process documentation to troubleshooting guides for our IT department. We recently figured out how to use Semantic Forms and the #ask function to create a customizable and reusable folksonomy. Read on to find out more.

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One of the functions of my team is to fulfill research requests for co-workers within our IT department. These requests can be as simple as something like finding a white paper from a vendor or research organization, or as in-depth as custom analysis and reports of a given topic.

In order to handle these requests, we’ve created a submission and request fulfillment process using Semantic Forms.

Co-workers can fill out the form and we’ll use the resulting wiki page to fulfill the request.

One of the fields in the form that we use when fulfilling the request is an open text box for tagging related topic areas. Those fulfilling the research request can use a comma separated list of items to generate a folksonomy that can be used elsewhere on the wiki.

In the form we have the following. The property “Research Related Tags” is a property with the type of “Page”.

{{{field|RelatedTags|property= Research_Related_Tags |values_from_property= Research_Related_Tags}}}

 

Then for our template, we have the following.

{{Research Entry Template|RelatedTags=}}

The following is to query the semantic data and display it.

{{#arraymap:{{{RelatedTags|}}}|,|x|[[Research_Related_Tags::x]]}}

The #arraymap function pulls back the list of tags and displays them in the template.

For example, I might get a request for researching more about Hover Cars. Hover Cars might be related to other wiki pages such as our Transportation page or a page titled Automobiles. If I enter a comma separated list of related pages into the tag box when fulfilling a research request (such as ‘transportation’ or ‘automobiles’, links to the research documentation will automatically be created to any page that matches that name.

Now the cool part is that we have a lot of existing content elsewhere in the wiki and we could never predict what new content is going to be created.

What we’ve done, is to modify the default template for every wiki page to pull back any research documentation related to that page. If you were on our Automobiles page at the bottom would be a link to any research requests tagged Automobiles. Automagically!

To do this, we use the #ask parser function to query the “Research Related Tags” property, but only show research requests that match the current page name.

{{#ask: [[Category:Research]] [[Research_Related_Tags::~{{FULLPAGENAME}}]]
|? Research_Level_Requested = Research Type
| ?PAGENAME= Entry Title
|format=ol
|limit=10
|link=subject
|default=No related research found. Submit a [[Research]] request?
|searchlabel=More Research Information
}}

The secret sauce is in this opening line.

{{#ask: [[Category:Research]] [[Research_Related_Tags::~{{FULLPAGENAME}}]]

This starts the inline query, limited to the Category of Research that has a value for “Research Related Tags similar (~ is a semantic wildcard) to the current FULLPAGENAME.

The rest of the ask command is pretty standard semantic media wiki syntax. The one additional item to point out is the default= condition. As I mentioned earlier, this query is on every wiki page and some (a lot of) wiki pages won’t have related tags.

If no research exists users are given the suggestion of submitting a research request. When new pages are created and they match existing research (or vice versa) this part of the page will automatically update with related research.

 

I hope this provides inspiration into a new way of extending the use of semantic data in your Mediawiki environment. Leave a comment if you have any questions.