Semantic Drilldown

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Software information
Software name Semantic Drilldown
Logo Placeholder.png
Screenshot File:Wiki.png
Developers Yaron Koren, David Loomer
Owners Mediawiki.org
First release date 2007/12/10
Status active"active" is not in the list (experimental, beta, stable, unknown, unmaintained, dead, zombie) of allowed values for the "Has status" property.
Last released November 2012
Last version 1.2.4
Programming language PHP
Operating systems Most
Platforms Any
Size (KB)
Languages Several
Genre Mediawiki
Keywords semantic web
Licenses GPL
Web site
Support websites
Description Semantic Drilldown is an extension to MediaWiki that provides a page for drilling down through a site's data, using categories and filters on semantic properties. It is heavily tied in with the Semantic MediaWiki extension, and is meant to be used for structured data that has semantic markup. You must have version 1.5 or later of Semantic MediaWiki installed for the Semantic Drilldown extension to work: the code will not work without it, or with an earlier version.
Last edit June 2013


Basic use

According, to the Semantic Drilldown page at Mediawiki.org, you first need "semantic contents", for example Semantic Forms.

(1) Analyze your data

You could use special:browseData to do so.

(2) Create filters

Every filter you want to be able to drill down with has to be defined separately, on a page in the "Filter:" namespace. The easiest way to create a filter is to simply go to the not-yet-created filter page, and click on the "Create with form" tab; this will show the 'CreateFilter' display Or, for you can go directly to Special:CreateFilter.

(3) Add filters to categories

Once you created filters, you can add the tag [[Has filter::Filter:filter-name]] (several possible) to a "semantic" top-level category page.

(4) Include/exclude categories

The use of Semantic DrillDown in a wiki like this one (i.e. not designed from the ground up as semantic mediawiki) requires some adjustments. The DrillDown special pages works from top-level categories. In this wiki there is only one, i.e. "Contents". The others that show up are mistakes :).

We could have used the following strategy to exclude all non-semantic categories:

  • By default no category will show up. In the LocalSettings.php file we set:
$sdgHideCategoriesByDefault = true;

But since we only have a single "normal" top-level category we just inserted this in the Contents page

_HIDEFROMDRILLDOWN_
  • Each category that should show up in the drilldown includes the following string:
_SHOWINDRILLDOWN_

Notice: For some weird reasons I can't insert two underscores in a row in the above (i.e. the nowiki filter doesn't work). Therefore use "__" instead of "_" !!

(5) Set some display options

You could set the title of the drilldown page for any specific category, for example:

 This category has the drilldown title [[Has drilldown title::Browse all cities]]. 

More options are available (to document)

Listing all filters