I'm trying to work out a way that newspapers can be operated by semantics, rather than continually editing the paper front page, or manually archiving news in "Issues", etc. I think that by using semantics properly we should be able to have the newspaper "front page" automatically display the latest articles, based on criteria the newspaper editor selects. This will require tagging the articles appropriately, of course. Ideally this should let an editor easily pick articles written by specific authors, about specific islands, topics, dates, realms, etc. It would also, theoretically, allow people to write "freelance" articles that would be included in whatever paper publishes articles on that topic. For example, you could tag your article with [[island::Dwilight]], and any newspaper that publishes Dwilight articles would automatically pick it up and include it.
I'm hoping that if we do it right, we could have a Semantic Form that would allow people to easily publish articles that will be automatically tagged with the right syntax and properties. I'd like to outline the semantics I think that we would need to make this work.
First, I think it would make sense to use a Record property. (
http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Type:Record) We would define multiple fields inside the property to handle the data we need. The data I think we would need includes:
Wiki Page (String) : Location of the article, so it can be linked properly, with a decent-looking title.
Publication Date (Date) : Date article was posted
Title (String) : A short title for the article
Author (String) : Author's name, if it's a wiki username then autolink to user page
Summary (String) : Short summary of the article's contents
Topic (Page) : For selecting subject matter by island, realm, etc.
Most of this stuff is self-explanatory, but some may need a bit of explanation:
Wiki Page: Semantic queries automatically return a link to the result page. But it's a link, not just a page string, and includes the full path. You can't use it to create a decent looking title. You get "The TattleMaster/Article/Title" as your page link. So we'll encode the page title in semantic data for use in generating a good, readable link to the article.
Topic : This would hold the topic of the article. I specified it as a Page variable, thinking that people could put in the page for whatever it covers. This could be a realm name, an island, a religion, a newspaper name, etc., or even a family name. People could pick various topics for inclusion, or exclusion, into their papers.
The declaration page for the property would look something like this:
[[has fields::String; Date; String; String; String; Page]]
When writing an article, you would declare the properties like this:
[[newspaper::The TattleMaster/Articles/New Newspaper Format; 15 Feb 2011; New Newspaper Format; Indirik; New semantics are available for newspapers to make writing and editing a newspaper easier, and eliminate the need for tedious editing and archiving news.; OOC]]
To select the latest five articles written for Dwilight you would query like this:
{{#ask: [[newspaper:: ?; ?; ?; ?; ?; Dwilight]]
| limit = 5
}}
Of course, this all assumes I'm correctly understanding how these Record properties work. Otherwise we will have to use multiple individual properties to hold all this information. I'm researching this, and just posting this here to record my thoughts so far.
