Saturday, January 26, 2013

Setting up an RDF server in VirtualBox, part 2

This is the second part of a two-part (maybe N-part?) series about setting up an RDF server in a VirtualBox instance with the Ubuntu 12.04 server distribution. In this part, I'll set up Mediawiki as a place to conveniently edit RDF/Turtle documents.

You might be thinking, what about Semantic Mediawiki? Doesn't this already exist? My experience with SMW was disappointing. The source syntax for creating links is pretty straightforward, and the silly naming scheme for importing external ontologies doesn't seem too bad. But when you want to do any real work with external ontologies, it gets difficult. After a few days of hacking around I couldn't find a way to say that a predicate defined in my SMW instance was owl:sameAs some predicate defined externally. At that point, I decided to strike out on my own.

The results of that effort are on GitHub at https://github.com/wware/stuff/tree/master/semantic-wiki. The setup script is to be run in the VirtualBox instance after the Ubuntu 12.04 server installation (with LAMP and SSH servers enabled) has completed.

This is a work in progress. When I've got it beaten into presentable shape, I'll put it up at http://willware.net with more explanatory material.