Talk:Semantic Wiki

Cleanup

It would be a good idea for people who post ideas to remove them or clean them up when they are moved to the front page, or we decide they are not appropriate. This page will rapidly get too cluttered with old idea to follow the current discussion. --Indirik 18:10, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Kudos

Once the battlemaster data can be extended to the wiki to remove manual inputs and have the wiki truly automaticly update itself, we'll be in a whole new, more user-friendly era of the game's wiki. The game could then compensate for the holes this will leave in the wiki's history files (okay, Bob is ruler now, but who was before him?), by having its own history logs which would also be a lot more accurate and reliable than manual inputs (if a page is only modified twice in three years, there is a good chance that there is a few judges and generals that have passed between both versions of the page). Anyways, I'm seeing great potential for this. First application I started is for realms, with functions for each council positions, number of nobles, of regions, the population, largest city, capital, state religion, and government type, though this could also be extended to include estimated food and gold production, as is available IG. Religions could also use their own system, as other cases could... We'll need a page like Meta:Style Guide so that we don't start seeing clone functions ("Island" and "Continent", for example). Anyways, this is quite an amazing step forward for the game's wiki, kudos for that. -Chénier 04:31, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Infoboxes

We have a lot of templates for stuff like region or realm info. Unfortunately, there are several competing options, such as Template:Infobox Regions and Template:Infobox region.

To avoid confusion, I suggest we take one of them, a good, clean one (I'd go with Template:Infobox region from the above list) and modify it for semantics, then put it up and update all region pages. I can automatically create the template data from the database, that would make things a ton easier.

We should also have a good naming scheme. Something like the "Infobox" prefix, which appears to be widely popular. Someone with an idea for an equally catchy term?

Speaking from a slightly biased point of view, I'd dump all the separate templates and go with the RealmBox Project. I'm sure I could modify that one to include the necessary semantic stuff. Especially through the use of the composite templates. RealmBox can also be configured to be used for regional infoboxes and religion boxes, too, as shown in RealmBox Project/Customizing. Using RealmBox people can still have their realm's template look different, but be based on the same template.

I agree with Indirik. In fact, I was already working to get everyone to use Realm Box, but I didn't want to just trample through all their templates without asking about changing it so its been slow progress. --Vita Family 14:58, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Good, let's do that. Set the Realm Box up for semantic and then move everything over. Quite a few of the templates in existence are not used at all, so we could also remove them. See Special:UnusedTemplates. --Tom 17:16, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Unused Templates are deleted. --Vita Family 18:17, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Options for Region Info templates

The following ones have been - more or less completly - modified to include semantics:

• Template:Infobox Regions
• Template:Infobox region
• Template:Region
• Template:Infobox_Regions_Small
• RealmBox Project - Can be easily configured for regions as shown here: RealmBox Project/Customizing

Options for Realm Info templates

(add those you found)

• RealmBox Project - Composite but customizable) realm templates can be seen here: RealmBox Project/Preconfigured Templates

Proposed Terms

Here's a list of terms I came up with that we could use:

hierarchical relations

• "part of" - denoting that a region is part of a realm, duchy, etc. and similar cases where one object belongs to another
• "member of" - is the equivalent for persons, e.g. a character is a "member of" a realm, or a religion, etc.
• "located on" - is for geographical relations. We could use "part of" for this, but the relation is different and "located on" can also be used for unique items, religions and even people, so it's more general
• "capital of" - is a special relation, and quite specific because it will be searched for. This is to be put on the region page, i.e. "Madina (City)" would contain [[capital of::Madina (Realm)]] the inverse would be "has capital" (see below)

• "... of" - is the general variant of "capital of", it is mostly intended for things like "judge of", which could be used on a character page to detail positions. examples:
  • ruler, general, judge, banker (of a realm)
  • knight or lord (of a region)
• "has ..." - is the inverse of the above "... of" relationship, e.g. a realm [[has judge::xxx]]

region data

• population
• region type
• location feature - this expresses things like mountains, rivers, coast, etc.
• gold production
• food production
• location
• weather area

realm data

• government is - the type of government
• founding date
• state/official/main religion (one term, please - I suggest "has official religion" - a "main" religion could a) change over time and can b) be determined automatically in theory.

guild and religion data

• founding date
• has founder (who created it, especially for religions) - the inverse would be "founder of"

unique items data

• discovered date
• discovered by
• (something to indicate if the item is presently owned by someone or lost, maybe?)
• has special bonus

characters

• "father/son/brother/etc of" - this can denote actual family relations. Membership in a family would, of course, be described as "member of".

-Tom Added some, as this is a talk page we can just add and edit, I expect?-Chénier 23:13, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes. I have removed all the "number" things, though. That is exactly what we do not want in a semantic web - stuff that has to be corrected manually all the time and could be calculated. --Tom 06:40, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

I think there's some confusion here. Depends on what the answer to my other question is, though... But the way I see it, if you put [[capital of::Fengen]] on the [[Enweil]] page, the relation created will be: "Enweil" is the capital of "Fengen", which isn't the case. I'm not saying I necessarily got it right, though, but given the example with germany and berlin on their website, that seems to be what it is. As such, you'll want the property [[has ruler::bob]] instead of [[ruler of::bob]], as the latter sates that your page is the ruler of Bob, instead of Bob being the ruler of the page. (Needs to resign, not closing <nowiki> erased it)

Oh, that's what you said. I could have sworn it wasn't there a second ago. Well, good, seems like we both understand it the same way:) (Needs to resign, not closing <nowiki> erased it)

That's exactly what I said and why I want a little more expressive terms. When you use "has ruler" and "ruler of" instead of just "ruler", it becomes immediately obvious that "ruler of::bob" makes no sense. --Tom 06:40, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Should be a term connecting a character to a family. Having trouble thinking of what though.--Athins 02:38, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

"member of" should cover family relations. The cool thing is that you can also model actual relations using semantic terms, so "son of" and "father of" works great, as does "brother of". I'll add a category for that. --Tom 06:40, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Maybe a "was member of" for former realms.--Athins 18:41, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

That's an interesting idea, but it would also require further annotations, specifically dates. Anyone know if there's a way to express things like "was a member of X from (date A) until (date B)" ?

"Part of" as relates to Duchies, Region pages as subpages

We are going to run into two problems that I can see so far with links.

• Using [[Part of:: ]] for duchies. This creates a link to the city name as a root page. The problem being that the region page for the city is a subpage of the island. This also conflicts with conventions in the case where the region, duchy, and realm all have the same name. Perhaps we need another convention for duchies: [[Part of::Duchy of Perdan]]? This will link to the root page of Duchy of Perdan.
• This brings up another point: Region pages are subpages of the island, so you can't really address them by the region name. This makes the listing of regions like this: Agyr, Daisha, Firbalt (Region)... further results. This isn't so much a problem as it is annoying. Helpful is you are, for some reason, compiling a list of regions across multiple islands, but I doubt that will be done much. I'm not sure if there's any way to get past this last one yet. I have a feeling there is none.

--Indirik 15:09, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, all these are now legacy problems of the structure we had. We should probably have "Perdan" be a disambiguation page that links to the City, the Duchy and the Realm. Then the links in infoboxes could link to the correct entry (e.g. "Perdan (Realm)") while using the pipe trick to display only "Perdan".

Region pages being subpages of islands is bad anyways. It helped, but it's not the way MediaWiki was intended to be. We should discuss whether we want to move them all. --Tom 22:31, 5 February 2009 (UTC)