Author Topic: Semantics for Newspapers  (Read 5441 times)

Indirik

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Semantics for Newspapers
« Topic Start: February 15, 2011, 07:19:42 PM »
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.
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egamma

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Re: Semantics for Newspapers
« Reply #1: March 03, 2011, 01:43:52 AM »
In other words, you want to replicate the standard blog format, where the latest article appears on top, and the rest below it, dropping off after 10 articles or some other number.

I like it, a blog format would be ideal for newspapers.

Indirik

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Re: Semantics for Newspapers
« Reply #2: March 03, 2011, 02:08:52 PM »
Yes, it would replicate a blog style of posting. It would also allow "freelance" writing. I could write a generic article about Dwilight, and any paper that publishes article about Dwilight would automatically pick it up. Now, maybe that's not all that useful a feature. But it would be possible.
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De-Legro

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Re: Semantics for Newspapers
« Reply #3: March 03, 2011, 11:09:19 PM »
Most of this should be possible, though we might need some more modules for the wiki to allow all the logic to work. Perhaps we should set up a dummy paper for testing?
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Indirik

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Re: Semantics for Newspapers
« Reply #4: March 04, 2011, 01:10:00 AM »
I sort of started with The TattleMaster. You can use that one, if you want. Or you can make a test one, whichever. I can delete it afterward, or we can leave it as an example.
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De-Legro

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Re: Semantics for Newspapers
« Reply #5: March 04, 2011, 01:40:14 AM »
I'll check it out
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cjnodell

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Re: Semantics for Newspapers
« Reply #6: May 09, 2011, 03:39:39 PM »
I was actually thinking how useful it would be if I could set up a basic blog like page on the wiki. I did some searching to see if this was already a feature but did not get far except for discovering that mediawiki supported a few blogging modules. I look forward to hearing more about this!

Indirik

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Re: Semantics for Newspapers
« Reply #7: May 09, 2011, 04:41:16 PM »
If you think there is a wiki extension that we could take advantage of, please let us know. I'm not really familiar with any MediaWiki extensions at all. While we could do some kind of blog using semantics, I'm not sure if it is the best idea, or even very efficient.
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cjnodell

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Re: Semantics for Newspapers
« Reply #8: May 11, 2011, 07:23:27 PM »
Not sure if this is something that would do what you guys are looking for, but here is one extension I found while looking around:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wikilog