Our presentation at the Semantic MediaWiki Conference was a smashing hit! I discussed the software we developed to create GeneWiki+, which we’ve christened mwsync.
Mwsync is a cool little Java framework that makes it easy to maintain a live mirror of any MediaWiki site that exposes the standard MediaWiki API. The framework copies over any changes made to the source site on a repeating basis so you always have the most recent copy of the site content. It also integrates well with the Semantic MediaWiki extension, since it can do transformations of the page content during transfer- for instance, to make links within the page have a particular “type”.
We used this software to merge the information on the Gene Wiki on Wikipedia with information on human SNPs over at SNPedia. During integration, the software creates links between each SNP and the gene it resides on, as well as annotating each page with any diseases mentioned in the text of the article. This creates a SNP-gene-disease network that can then be explored using Semantic MediaWiki’s query engine, or exported as RDF for use in a SPARQL endpoint.
Of course, this integration technique can be used for more than just biology. As an example in the presentation, I explore the idea of merging two recipe wikis into one Semantic Recipes Wiki, and all the benefits that would bring. We think that the possibilities are huge and would be excited for others to use our software, give us some feedback/critiques, and show off what can be done.
The slides of my presentation can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/erikclarke/integrating-knowledge-with-semantic-mediawiki-and-mwsync
[slideshare id=12749659&doc=smwconpresentation-120430155831-phpapp01]
The repository for mwsync is here: http://bitbucket.org/sulab/mwsync