Semantic MediaWiki/Implementation/Page Editing and Namespaces
Editor Experience
[edit]Editing an article in a Semantic MediaWiki reveals that the underlying page "source" is much the same.
Representing Relations
[edit]To express relations to other articles, you take a regular Wiki link such as "located in the southwestern corner of [[is located in::California]]" and specify the kind of link as a prefix separated by a double colon ::, thus
located in the southwestern corner of [[is located in:: California]]
Representing Attributes
[edit]To express attribute values, you put the value and optinal units inside a Wiki link, and specify the kind of value as a prefix separated by colon-equals :=, thus
estimated the city to have [[population:=1,305,737]] residents
For more details on editing links, read the Editing help on relations and attributes in the ontoworld wiki.
Relation, Attribute, and Type Namespaces
[edit]If you click on the text giving the type of a relation or attribute in the infobox, you'll see that relations like "is located in" are in a separate Relation: namespace, and attributes like "population" are in a separate Attribute: namespace.
There are Special:Relations and Special:Attributes pages that list these pages.
In order for SMW to know the format of an attribute such as population, it must have a page in the Attribute: namespace that declares its datatype using the magic relation [[has type::Type:type name]]. These datatypes are in a third namespace, Type.
Up to Implementation TOC previous: User Experience next: Representation in database and RDF
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