Semantic Wiki

Introduction

The BattleMaster Wiki uses Semantic MediaWiki to turn itself into a full-blown Semantic Web.

What does that mean when we strip out the buzzwords?

It means that - with proper markup - the wiki "understands" its own content, and can generate answers to fairly complicated questions such as "which realms (on any island) have the highest population-to-nobles ratios?" - not because any human has actually done the math, but because the wiki contains information about the realms, their populations and the number of nobles in them, and can do the math itself.

Yes, we can use external data sources and with time the game will be extended to offer them. That means that Semantic Web also means you do not have to hand-craft (and update constantly) the boxes that contain basic realm data such as name, regions, population, etc.

Scope

We are not aiming for the big thing, or integration with a world-wide semantic web. BattleMaster is it's own small world, with more well-defined terms and boundaries than the real world (where, for example, it isn't always clear what exactly a "realm" even is). As such, it is well-suited to using the Semantic Web technology.

Supporting Templates

The subpage /Templates discusses templates you can use to make use of Semantic Web functions with minimal additional hassle.

Ontology

This is where we define what is and what isn't, i.e. the semantic relations that we want to use. This is necessary or useful because it avoids duplications that would really mess things up. For example, if we call the game worlds "islands" in some cases and "continents" in others, that will make a lot of queries faulty, as their results will only show those instances that were annotated one way or the other.

Below are the terms that are set and fixed. Please do not modify this list - put new suggestions on the talk page.

Property:located on 

denotes the game-world the item can be found on, e.g. [[located on::Atamara]] tells us this realm, region, religion or whatever can be found on the island/continent Atamara

Property:population 

denotes the population of an item, usually a region or a realm. This is a number type, so it must contain a valid number, even if that is a guess or approximation. Terms like "ca. 1 mio" are invalid, use "1000000" instead. Example: [[population::5200]]

Further terms will be added as we discuss and agree on them.

TODO / Questions

• Do we want to add Halo ?