"A semantic wiki gives you all the issues arising in the full semantic web"

IkeWiki is a semantic wiki, written in Java (so it's not an extension of MediaWiki, though MediaWiki/Wikipedia users will be able to use it right away). And opensource.

It tries to use "wiki technologies" and some Ajax magic to make annotating Wiki pages with semantic information easier.

It's not yet perfect, of course. It's a research project, after all. But it tries really hard to make annotating Wiki pages easy.

Why do we need semantic wikis?

Well, wikipedia is great, but a computer can't access that information. Human language processing is by far not yet good enough for that. Even many humans sometimes fail at it, actually...

So right now, a computer application can't reliably read from Wikipedia things like a duck being a bird or that it has feathers. So if you want to be able to search in Wikipedia for "all animals that have feathers", that won't work too well.

Many of the things in Wikipedia are hacks and workarounds. This includes links to foreign language versions of the page, categories, or the classification boxes in biology topics. It's all just visuals and workarounds.

Semantic Wikis are much more powerful. They don't just have "links", they have typed links, so that the computer actually assign some meaning to them. (The wikipedia entry on birds has links to "plants" and "mammals", so you really need this information to not assume a bird might be a plant...)

Ikewiki (which supposedly translates to "knowledge fast") trys to bring together these worlds - the easy to edit world of wikis and the semantic annotation required for the data to be useful to computers, too.

The key thing is an easy to use UI, and the current approach by Ikewiki is to put some small buttons next to links (and pages, maybe later paragraphs, who knows) that allow adding and removing of types. By using some Ajax magic, this is really easy to use; and the application will actually try to use the already present information to only offer reasonable choices. (e.g. offering the "belongs to the family of" relation only for biology topics)

Anyway, check it out. It's an open source project. Improve it. And - to come back to the initial quote - use it to understand the semantic web better. Unless some huge breakthrough in natural language processing occurs, we'll need semantic information for the next generation of internet applications.

... oder fast keiner. Zur Fußball-WM fahren zusätzliche S-Bahnen nachts.

Eigentlich ein ganz tolles Angebot (so musste ich z.B. gestern abend nicht um 0:05 die Geburtstagsfeier schon wieder verlassen, sondern hatte um 1:20 und 1:50 nochmal Chancen nach Hause zu kommen). Sogar Sonntag auf Montag.

Nur leider viel zu wenig publik gemacht. Die "elektronische Fahrplanauskunft" EFA ist die einzige Stelle, wo ich bisher Informationen über diese zusätzlichen Züge gefunden habe.

Jetzt würde es mich nicht wundern, wenn die Bahn das ausnutzt, und damit "belegt" dass es keinen Bedarf für diese Züge gibt, und sie auch noch die nächsten 10 Jahre nicht einführt. Obwohl das Münchner Nachtleben nicht vor 10 Uhr beginnt (und dementsprechend nicht um 12 Uhr endet)...