Semantic MediaWiki

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There's a lot of information on wiki.laptop.org. wikipedia:Semantic MediaWiki is an extension that lets you annotate existing wiki text and templates so that you can query and explore this information. Done right we get less duplication, more standardization, and easy information reuse.

mw:Semantic Forms is another extension that exploits SMW to let users edit template information in a form.

Where Semantics are being used

You can browse Special:Properties to see properties in use. You can use Special:Allpages to display Form: pages.

For tests

Many tests are using semantic annotations, so we can query for them. See Test cases 8.2.0 and Testcase Query Examples.

To display query results so that they look like the test case (green badge), use format=embedded. To display in some other format, someone has to create Template:Display_query_row_in_a_gray_box and use format=template | template=Display query row in a gray box

Some test results are also using semantic annotations, see TestResults 8.2.0.

Issues for Test cases

• Compare Tests/Sugar Control Panel/About Me/Color Change and Eben's Tests/Home view, latter uses different terminology: Justification (like Feature?), Actions (like Procedure?, Verify (like Expected results and pass criteria?
• Property:Build stream could usefully have service links to builds, diffs, packages, etc. This requires lowercase names (most URL's use joyride, not Joyride). See Property:Build stream for a discussion.

Structuring Test cases

We are using long titles that identify area, e.g. Tests/Sugar_Control_Panel/About_Me/Color_Change. Putting the organization in the name ensures test cases will appear in a useful order in generic queries.

Could also/instead use subcategories of Category:Test cases to identify the kind of test, but Semantic Forms has limited capability to assign categories. A query for a category will find things in its subcategories, so it's fine to have a detailed category hierarchy.

It might be possible to query for test cases "like" Tests/Sugar_*. to only show certain test cases.

Issues for test results

Test cases 8.2.0 is one page with many test results on it; so the page winds up having two values for Property:PassFail, "Pass" and "Fail". But to isolate each result, you would have to create a separate page for each combination of test case and build, e.g. TR_Build2230/Sugar Control Panel/Date & Time. That's a lot of pages to name, although Semantic Forms can automatically generate a unique page as you fill in a form]. Is there any reason to have semantics for each test result, when you can simply visit a page with the test results?

Details: Form:Test_case somehow has adds a Template:Test results for each test result. There's also Form:Test Results which brings up a broken editing form and invokes a non-existent Template:Test Results, see Try_to_break_2.

• TODO: figure out a generic way to have a link _Log a test result_ that when clicked goes to Form:Test_result and the wiki editor fills in a form that creates a test result linked to the original page. Then any page with a test on it can be "filled out" with test results that anyone can enter!
  • Try it:
    • Special:AddPage/Test_Results/Trying_to_break
    • {{#formlink:Test_Results|add a result for "Trying to break"|query_string}}

• Property:PassFail perhaps should be Type:boolean, just Pass true/false.
• Property:Trac bug number perhaps should be Type:URL, see discussion above.

For projects and tasks

see Form:Tasks and Form:Project, and their respective template pages Template:Task and Template:Project. We would like to use the Project, and Task forms to track projects, and to some extent replace the project database. The tasks template should be for small open tasks that will then be populated on aggregate pages based on various properties like priority and skill set required.

For deployments

All deployments have the deployment template on them. They also have the "edit with form" tab on the main page. This is seen on for example OLPC Peru. This information is aggregated on the page Deployments, using a semantic query. Also see Deployment query examples.

For activities

There is currently the Template:Activity page that is annotates general information about activities. Form:Activity fills this in. There is also a Template:Activity bundle that allows for multiple bundle versions so that you can keep track of, for example, the last activity version that works with build 656 separately from the latest version.

The To add another activity version that works with other builds click "add another form interface works nicely for editing, but doesn't work for querying! It just adds more Property:Activity version and Property:Activity bundle values to the page — they aren't grouped together in any way except visually. This is the same underlying issue as adding multiple Test results to a test case, see #Issues for test results. -- Skierpage 01:08, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

We need to fix the main template so that it will also include a place for the .xo bundle

You can see an example query page Activity_query_examples

Adapting activities and their templates to use Semantic Forms would make it easier to

• maintain the Activities page
• show the status of activities in various activity packs
• query for things like activities that don't have a translation status.

Activity update?

The XO's Software update panel (new in release 8.2.0) consults wiki pages like Activities and Activities/Joyride to figure out whether a newer version of an activity is available. Perhaps these pages could be generated by querying for the properties of activities, but the resulting HTML has to match a rigorous Activity microformat.

Other things to do ??

People want changes but what exactly?

• Unify Creating_an_activity and the new Form:Activity?
• Unify the OBX box and the semantic properties?
• Generate tables of activities?
  • Replace the Bundled/Core/Extra distinctions with properties?

For releases

The Releases page had duplicated summary information for each release. This is now annotated in each release page (see e.g. 8.1.0), and the Releases page has several queries for the information:

• Status NOT "released", i.e. future releases.
• Status "released" sorted by Release_date, i.e. past releases.
• An eventline query for release date and/or target date.
• A "What release am I running?" query that shows the build number first.

Also see Releases-test page.

Info for each release

Here are some properties that releases may have, based on the Releases page and e-mail message "Re: [sw-eco] q2e11 firmware for 8.1.2 ECO" to devel@laptop.org of 2008-07-15:

• Property:Status: string, restricted to values like "nascent", "gathering requirements", "released".
• Property:Primary maintainer: usually someone with a wiki page
• Note the Release Notes wiki page can be derived from the release name, it's always Release_notes/N.N.N
• ECO: a release uses the more general Property:Is part of to link to an ECO's wiki page
• Primary objectives: a release can have multiple Property:Has objective values.
• Property:Lead customer: wiki page, can be the country Peru or the organization OLPC_Peru.
• Build Name and URL: the former is Property:Build number, the latter can be derived from Build_number, it's always http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/official/NNN
• Schedule: Each release page can have a Property:Target date if it's still planned and should have a Property:Release date when its status becomes "released". The release's page may have additional details such as a schedule URL, Created date, or Date documentation posted, these aren't properties.
• a Property:firmware wiki page like OLPC Firmware q2e15. or is this a property of the build?

Release info issues

• If Greg wants to re-display additional status information in the queries on the Releases page like "Candidate build is out - Join the test effort!", we could add Property:More info to release pages and display in queries.
• The Releases page used to show
  • link to release notes
  • URL for build directory
  • each objective in a bulleted list

Displaying these in the queries would require creating a query results template.

ECOs?

Each ECO is associated with a release and has info like:

• Title: string (not always a release)
• Date proposed: date
• Target date: date, sometimes fuzzy like "week of 2008-03-02"
• Trac items: multiple bug numbers (and manual copy of their text)
• Date released
• Priority: "normal", "high", with string
• Champion: usually someone with a wiki page.
• Reviewers: wiki text, often includes "triage team" and/or "Testing: 1 hour smoke"
• Special testing required: string
• Rollout: "Manufacturing" and "Field"
• Checklist: wiki page for URL, usually <ECO page_name>_Checklist

It's unclear if any of this is worth annotating. Maybe a table of ECOs with their build and firmware, but the release is tied to an ECO, not vice-versa.

Reusing release values

wiki.laptop.org uses three methods to display a changing value like The release candidate on multiple pages without having to update each one.

• Mention one of the sub-templates of Template:Latest Releases, such as Template:Latest_Releases/stable

latest release is ==> 13.2.11 || 2020-01-29

• Transclude a subpage with the information, such as Friends in testing/current image number or Friends in testing/current image stream

current testing stream & release is ==> official & os860

• Use SMW's #ask or show function to display a property from a page, such as Property:Current image number for testing or Property:Current image stream for testing

current testing stream & release is ==> {{#ask: Friends in testing/current image stream | ?Current image stream for testing=}} & {{#ask: Friends in testing/current image number | ?Current image number for testing=}}

#show should also work... {{#show: Friends in testing/current image stream ?Current image stream for testing}} & {{#show: Friends in testing/current image number ?Current image number for testing}}

As of 2008-08-07 this last semantic approach is implemented completely the wrong way, these should be generic properties Property:Stream and Property:Build associated with a descriptive page like Testing build or Stable release, not specific properties on specific page names. -- Skierpage 10:27, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

For events

Annotate events, jams, and meetings with [Property:Start date]], and then other pages can query to get a list or timeline of future pages. See the queries on Jams and Events#Upcoming events on wiki.laptop.org

• Also give events a Property:End date; this is optional for meetings and jams that are usually one day.

• Additional properties appropriate for events are Property:Has location city and Property:Has location country

• Can also use Property:Cooordinates to annotate where an event is. See, e.g. OLPC Switzerland/Meeting October Bern. Unfortunately it seems that displaying multiple events as markers on a map requires additional extensions.

Where semantics could be used

Content repositories?

User:Lauren and others created lots of pages in Category:Content Repository about various online libraries and collections. These pages have information such as

• Format
• Scope
• Multilingualism
• Quality

which could be made into semantic annotations for properties with these names, so you could query "Show me the name, url, and formats of all content repositories of topic::music with quality::high.

These seems to come from Template:Content item (maybe there's a "Create content item" link or option somewhere?). However, skierpage looked at a dozen of these pages in September 2008 and in most of them these fields aren't filled out.

To Do list

Trivial Fixes

(ie just install something/ fix something that’s already installed)

Semantic google maps

Way to embed google maps in wiki with locations of projects/deployments and with links to appropriate wiki pages.

Create a property of Type:Geographic coordinate and you get "service links" to Google maps for free (see e.g. [1], click the (?) symbol). However, displaying several such locations on one Google Map is tricky, you either need the Semantic Google Maps extension with SMW version 1.2 and/or the Google Maps extension (see example) -- Skierpage 10:26, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Easy Fixes

(ie just edit a little bit of code)

Auto generate templates

Make template an activity and edit with form

Move around the <no include> tags

But when empty it should show something

Make a tag that says this is not semantic stuff

Ignore semantics in a specific name space

Alt text not working in templates

Feature part of Tests/Sugar_Control_Panel/About_Me/Color_Change

Add new types

• It's easy to add a property that has some built-in type (like [[Has type::Text]] and restrict it to certain values and maybe control its format.
• It's possible to add a new "linear" type that converts between different units , e.g. a Type;Area
• it's hard to add other kinds of types, it requires writing PHP code.
• -- Skierpage 10:42, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Time duration

If you want auto-conversion between e.g. weeks and days and seconds, copy what you want from [2] -- Skierpage 10:42, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

User

Not sure what this means. If it's links to User:skierpage then maybe just create Property:User of type:page.

Trac bug number

This is available as Property:Trac bug number of type:Number. You should be able to use Service links and templates in query results to get this to display as a link. But numbers appear with a comma for the thousands separator. Could instead make it Type:URL and you use a template to fabricate the URL, but then it would appear as a long URL in query results. It might be possible to write PHP code to create a Type:Trac that displays appropriately, similar to how the <trac>4321</trac> code displays.

Image

Just some property of Type:Page (the default), in most cases SMW do the right thing and display the image .

Template?

Make the free text box larger.

When creating a template, you should be able to create properties in that window as well as use already created properties.

Way to 'prettify' links when used in SMW properties with a "Page" type.

Example: Color Change instead of Tests/Sugar_Control_Panel/About_Me/Color_Change.

See #Suggestions_for_test_cases. Maybe have a "Brief name" property and display that while linking to the full page name. Or, in queries use format=template and in the template use a parser string function to change the title from Tests/Sugar_Control_Panel/About_Me/Color_Change. Or, use categories to identify the hierarchy. You risk collision if the page title is just Color change, so you could have a little "TC" prefix, just TC/Color Change or a pseudo-namespace TC:Color_change

Translating Property names

Nathany on #cc

When making a template add a more organized presentation of properties

Complex fixes

(ie require creating a new extension)

Something in between a list of specific allowed values and free text

I want to be able to have the equivalent of an other field

One approach: have two properties like Property:Version and Property:Version_more that you always display together, the first has restricted values, the other is text. Another is to use Type:Page and have pages for the allowed values. So not-allowed values "work", but stand out in red.

Way to automatically email users who maintain pages

Automatically populate data

ex page last updated case

SMW 1.1 can't query on or display such metadata. I think other extensions like DPL can.

Way to pull %translated from pootle

Could have a bot that gets this information and populates wiki pages with it.

Semantic annotations

The wiki has the wikipedia:Semantic MediaWiki extension installed, the thing to do is use it appropriately.

Successful rollout suggestions

• Deliver benefits early.
  • To a casual editor, SMW is just more markup, more stuff to learn, an ugly factbox on pages, more "Semantic Web 3.0" hype. So find use cases that deliver obvious benefits early
• Don't create lots of properties and spend time annotating lots of pages until you have use cases for them. A person reading one wiki page after another does not need semantic annotations.
• It's fine to convert templates to make semantic annotations, since you get this "for free"

wiki.laptop.org issues

Use Template:SMW issue to note a problem on any page, it'll show up on the Property:SMW issue page.

Template conversion

• Use arraymap to turn lists of things into multiple property assignments.
• Use Semantic Forms... (not sure about it)
• Beware, people take advantage of wiki markup to stick all kinds of text inside templates. Maybe have an "fieldname extra info" field for arbitrary text.

Generic names

Should Property:Test objective be a generic name, or specialize it to Property:Test case objective ? skierpage's bias is to use generic names, but document on their property page what templates and pages use them.