Wikispooks:Semantic Objects

Wikispooks semantic objects are the core of the semantic data model, which allows the site to be machine readable. Each page is defined as a particular object from the list at SMWObject. For people, Person is used, for groups of people, use Group and so on. Each object has a specific set of parameters, although the objects have many parameters in common.

Objects On Wikispooks

All new pages must have exactly one object template. Some namespaces, such as document: mandate use of a particular template (e.g. Template:Document, but a choice of templates is available for pages in the main: namespace. In case of doubt, use Template:Concept to make the page a concept object.

Object Templates

The semantic object templates are deliberately similar. Custom Wikispooks template code silently sets the Semantic Properties (eventually, almost all parameters will have a corresponding property) and then calls a standard infobox template from Wikipedia to display the information. These are lightly customised, e.g. with a few extra parameters, such as |wikipedia.

Parameters

All the semantic object templates share a common color coding scheme, summarised below:

Blue parameters are for a single Wikispooks page name (If no suitable page exists, then pick a title for a future page)
Brown parameters are for numbers
Green parameters are for comma-separated lists of page names (Or planned page names).
Navy parameters are for dates
Orange parameters are for booleans. (Usually, either "Yes" or just leave blank).
Purple parameters are URLs.
Violet parameters are slash-separated lists.
Pink parameters are for coordinates.
Crossed out parameters were formerly available, but have been upgraded. Some may still work, but do not use these.

All parameters are optional, but you are strongly recommended to assign a |Wikipedia parameter, which connects this to the corresponding Wikipedia page, and so allows User:MaintenanceBot to automatically upgrade the page with appropriate information from that page. If there is no corresponding Wikipedia page, adding the parameter but leaving it blank (i.e. "|Wikipedia=" ) is a good way to save another editor the wasted time of looking for the page.

Lists

The templates have a lot of Green parameters. These are for comma-separated lists of pagenames. This means that the "," character is a reserved character and so should not be used in ordinary page titles (though it may be used in redirects). If you wish to indicate that a list is known to be incomplete, use the special word "...", which must be at the end of the list. To indicate that it is unknown whether or not the list is incomplete, end it with the special word "...?"

Subobjects

In the longer term, a wider choice of objects might be beneficial. To do this, rather than code objects from scratch, most new objects will probably be derived as 'sub-objects' from another object types according to the 'type' parameter. These could then have 'type' parameters of their own, allowing sub-sub-objects etc. where needed. For this reason, use of the |type parameter is strongly recommended.

See Also

• Category:Object Templates
• The talk page for discussion/suggestion of other objects.

Semantic Mediawiki

Semantic Objects Semantic Templates SMW Best Practice Semantic Properties Semantic Forms SMW Known Issues