Help:SemanticMW import external vocabulary

In Semantic MediaWiki it is possible to import and reuse controlled vocabulary that belongs to existing Semantic Web documents or standards by associating the vocabulary's elements with wiki terms.

Import vocabulary

An example of this functionality is the use of the FOAF vocabulary in the TestWiki. Although the associated terms work like any other annotation in the wiki, the RDF that is exported will directly use the elements of the FOAF specification, thus allowing users to edit FOAF files through the wiki.

Importing an external vocabulary into a SMW property consists on three steps:

Making vocabularies available for import

• The page is in the Mediawiki namespace with the prefix smw_import_.

Create an entry in MediaWiki namespace having the following format:

Mediawiki:Smw_import_vocabulary_name 

where service_name is a given name for the service. The first part of the new created service name is mandatory prefixed by Mediawiki:Smw_import_ For example, the page for the foaf vocabulary is named MediaWiki:smw_import_foaf.

• edit the new page and insert vocabulary elements having the following format:

http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/%7CFriend Of A Friend
name|Type:String
homepage|Type:URI
Person|Category
knows|Type:Page
.......

• save the page.

Create property or modify an existing one

Create a SMW Property. When the Property already exists, edit it and add the vocabulary element to the property as follows:

This is a property of type [[has type::Element type|Element type]]

and is imported from 
[[imported from::foaf:vocabulary_element]] 

The names of the selected pages, without namespace prefix, are either shown automatically in query results, or optionally by specifying mainlabel. Names are [[has type::String|strings]].

Applications of Property FoafName include:

• the name deviates from the pagename without namespace prefix, e.g.

• • it is the full name while the pagename is a short form

• • it includes the namespace prefix (we can also use the separate [[Attribute:Ns]])

• • it starts with a lowercase letter

• selection with an inequality

Formally, FoafName is represented by the FOAF property [[imported from::foaf:name]].

• Save the Property page.

Property usage

The property could be used as any other property. Use the new created property in a wiki page as:

[[FoafName::somename]]

When this page will be exported as RDF, the property will appare like:

......
<foaf:name rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string">somename</foaf:name>
......

Changing import statements

It can easily happen that some existing article of the wiki should be modified to represent (another) imported concept. For example, a wiki community that already uses a category "Person" might decide to map this category to "foaf:Person" in the future. Import statements in existing articles can be changed at any point in time without requiring additional updates in the wiki. The exported RDF will immediately be modified accordingly.