Data Storage
From Eureka
There are (at least) three possibilities for data storage in Eureka. To discuss this page, go to Talk:Data Storage.
Contents |
Option A. Semantic Mediawiki via embedded markup
See the page for the Journal of Knot Theory and its Ramifications. The underlying philosophy is that one enters text on a journal page in ordinary english, and not directly in template/tabular form. When important attributes are mentioned, they are marked up, e.g.:
"...is a journal published by [[Published by::World Scientific]]. It was started by Louis Kauffman in [[First Published In:=1992]] during the 'quantum topology' revolution."
This is only a very small addition to ordinary wiki syntax, in which the terms "World Scientific", etc. would have been marked up anyway. The new fields for marking up must be explained to new wiki users.
The idea is that all this data (called annotation) is then also displayed in a handy "infobox" which Blake is tweaking to look better. Ultimately we want it to look like this table on the Tajik ethnic group.
Clicking on the "+"-symbol next to Louis Kauffman's name in the "Editor-in-chief" box then takes you to a page showing all the journals he is an editor for. Again, the way these results are shown must be made to look MUCH more elegant; we wait in eager anticipation.
This leaves some questions though... what data do we store under the page for Louis Kauffman, for instance? An automatically generated table? How do we categorize the data? And so on.
I've entered in all the data available from www.journalprices.com and www.eigenfactor.org (the AMS data has not been incorporated, though it should have). All the editors (not just the main ones) appear too. Obviously this might be overkill, but I wanted to show all the data there is, so we can chop some out if need be. For instance, as regards the editors, we could (a) display them as a drop-down-list widget, or (b) not have them at all.
Option B. Semantic MediaWiki via templates
It is possible to insert the semantic mark-up into templates. For an example, see the Building info template at [this site]. In this setup, a standard "infobox" will be displayed on the right, showing the vital statistics of the journal at hand. This information will originally be obtained from the sources outlined in Extracting Data on Journals. The role of the wiki contributor is simply to add some human, english text to the page.
Advantages
- New wiki contributors don't have to learn any new syntax, other than normal wikipedia usage.
- The templates can be made to look very pretty, see this example.
- One could easily provide all the journals with a startup template in this way, with the data obtained from the standard sources. Thus the role of the wiki contributor would simply be to contribute extra "human" information to the page...as well as possibly add some fields to the template, such as editors.
Disadvantages
- Adding semantic data via templates is a feature of Semantic Mediawiki 0.7. Currently we are only able to run Semantic Mediawiki 0.4.
- If the wiki user changes an article of data (say the "price") in the main section of the page then he/she will also have to adjust the template manually.
Option C. No database functionality - ordinary wiki
In this setup, one completely abandons the attempt to mesh the idea of a database with the idea of a wiki. Pages are edited on an ad-hoc basis.
Advantages
- Quick, easy and simple.
Disadvantages
- You can't interact with the data. You couldn't query "Find the top 5 topology journals according to Eigenfactor". One is at the mercy of the basic functionality provided by categories in Mediawiki.
