Help:Technology

How does this site work?
This site runs on an Apache web server on RedHat Linux. It is powered by the Mediawiki software package, based on PHP and MySQL. It uses extensions to the Mediawiki software, including Semantic Mediawiki, to implement semantic links and queries within the wiki. Some additional extensions and a few hacks have been added for good measure.

What is the semantic web?
The world-wide-web consists primarily of pages and links. Mathematically, it can be simplistically modeled by a directed graph, with nodes for the pages, and edges linking the pages to eachother. A classic example, within wikipedia, is that the page for Berlin is linked to the page for Germany.

A semantic web consists of a collection of pages, with semantic links between them. Mathematically, it is modeled by a labeled directed graph. The canonical example is that, rather than simply a link from the Berlin page to the Germany page, one would like a "semantic link", labelled by the phrase "is the capital of". In such a way, a semantic web contains not only pages with links, but also it contains information about the precise nature of relationships between pages.

The additional information provided by semantic links allows information to be easily queried, and intelligently navigated.

What is Semantic Mediawiki?
Semantic Mediawiki is an extension to the Mediawiki software package, which implements semantic links within wiki-pages. Like the Mediawiki software, the data of pages and links is stored within a MySQL database; however more data is stored, in order to keep track of the semantic nature of the links.

What extensions are being used?
The list of extensions used can be found at the Special:Version page.