Minutes for November 23 2008 SMW Users Meeting at Monitor Group

The Sunday, Nov. 23 2008 portion of the SMW users meeting featured more-in-depth discussions about desired features and community-building.

See also Livescribe of Sunday's meeting and chat log
 * Note: contact Joel if you need access (smw2008 -at- natividads.com)
 * Treat the ink as Visual Bookmarks. Click on the ink and the audio will jump to what was being said while the corresponding inking was being written.

Features
Access and Authorization 
 * Using groups
 * Namespace-based, category-based, query-based, original-author-based permissions
 * Look at Extension:GroupBasedAccessControl
 * Need "can be read by group", "Can be written by group" properties?
 * SMW queries must respect this access control
 * Also "recent changes" pages.
 * Group somehow defined within wiki text
 * Use LDAP? Make it function like LDAP, add in ability to plug in LDAP
 * Policies are also pages
 * defining user groups through the wiki (semantically)

Workflow
 * change in property value leads to
 * other properties changing values
 * change in access control
 * email notification
 * Already implemented by Ontoprise; to be released
 * Semantic Tasks already handles scheduled email notification.
 * enable single action to modify a group of pages
 * store a formalization of data lifecycle
 * perhaps implement this through an external tool like Yahoo! Pipes (see some examples of how this could be done)

Other proposed changes and additions
Semantic Forms
 * Halo ontology browser popup from forms
 * Nicer-looking forms created by "Create Form"
 * conditional autocompletion on forms
 * categories as autocompletion values in SF
 * query results as autocompletion dropdown values in SF

Semantic Template
 * tools for editing templates
 * meta-model for data that outputs catagories, forms, templates

Data Import/Export
 * "Save as CSV" link in #ask query output
 * import XML into wiki pages
 * import RDF/OWL into wikipages
 * implement standard ontologies into SMW (possibly through pakcages)

Connection to triple store
 * SPARQL endpoint within SMW
 * SMW using triple store as a data source
 * data in triple store independent of wiki text

Misc
 * Semantic refresh on save
 * customizable start pages for users
 * rules in SMW (derive from SWRL)

Also - see Mike C.'s example of a Perlwikipedia-based bot that can access template data in MediaWiki.

Future meetings
The consensus was that users should try to arrange SMW-related meetings at relevant conferences such as ISWC, ESWC and SemTech; and that, in addition, there should be two dedicated meetings every year, in the style of this one: tentatively, it was decided that they should alternate between the United States and Europe (with Germany being the most obvious location for European meetings), and that they should take place in the fall and spring of each year.

Photos
Photos of the whiteboards used during the meeting:

Photos of some of the attendees, at the end:

(All photos courtesy of Joel Natividad.)