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For the last two years, the Interpretive Technology team at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has used Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) as a development platform as an alternative to a more laborious, traditional software design approach. This wiki-based approach has enabled the team to give users a working, bare-bones application immediately with the ability to refine the wiki installation as the users’ needs dictate. This approach has additionally allowed the team to get away from the traditional “boxes and fields tied to a SQL database” approach and move towards one in which a majority of the data lives inside free-text fields, but is still available for querying.

Using a Semantic MediaWiki-based application developed for documentation of conservation practices, the panelists will demonstrate:

Using SMW as a software development platform; Using SMW as a data aggregator in conjunction with Web services; Data sharing between wikis; Using MediaWiki extensions to improve workflow (external image management, etc); Using SMW to exploit the Semantic Web with RDF exports and linked data; Using SMW as a platform for vocabulary development and standardization (employing the CIDOC-CRM as a model).
The panelists will give an overview of current development efforts, lessons learned, and opportunities for near-term development.