For any project like this, web hosting for MediaWiki, and funding to pay for hosting, are related issues. I’m still experimenting so I’m not sure how powerful a server the project will need in the long term or how much money I’ll be able to raise. Continue reading →

‘On this day in history’ is a popular thing on social media but the dates are often technically wrong because of the discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian calendars. This isn’t a serious problem if you’re just tweeting factoids, but it is a serious problem if you want to create reliable historical data that people can use in their research. This post explains the problem and how Semantic MediaWiki can solve it.

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Exciting news: the By The Sword Linked wiki can now be viewed at:

https://www.bytheswordlinked.uk/wiki/Main_Page

So far there are only a few example pages but it should give a good idea of how it works and what it can do. It’s still a work in progress so any feedback would be very useful to help improve it. You can comment on this post or on Twitter, but the wiki itself can’t yet be edited by anyone but me (it will be opened up to other people eventually, but I don’t know exactly when).

I’ve also put a copy of the data structures documentation at Google Docs so that anyone can comment on it there. This is a bit more technical but I would be grateful for any feedback or advice, especially from anyone who knows about Linked Open Data but also from anyone who knows about history, if you have time to read it (it’s quite long because although I’ve tried to keep the data structures as simple as possible, we all know that history is complicated).

My first impression is that the server is very fast, but I don’t know how things will go when the numbers of pages and users go up in future.

This project will do lots of useful things, and will be expandable in future, but it has to be kept within limits to be achievable. This post is a list of some things that will be left until later or not included at all. Continue reading →

A large part of what I’m trying to do with By The Sword Linked involves indexing and citing historical sources. This means that I need to model bibliographic data about published sources, which is something that seems simple as long as you don’t think about it… The more you think about it, the more you realise how complicated it is. This post explains how I’m doing it and why. I’d be grateful for any comments or criticisms. Continue reading →

By The Sword Linked will be based on the principles of Linked Open Data. Most users won’t need to know the technical details of what goes on behind the scenes, but it’s still useful to sketch out the basic principles and the way they work in Semantic MediaWiki because these things influence the structures of the data that I’m creating and how users will be able to navigate it. I won’t say much about the technical details of machine-readable RDF code. This is partly because I don’t think many people actually want to use RDF directly, and partly because Semantic MediaWiki automatically creates and publishes it as a side-effect of the wiki templates and semantic properties that have to be defined for the wiki itself to work, so even I don’t really need to learn much about RDF (but it will be there if you want it). Continue reading →

By The Sword Linked will use Semantic MediaWiki to create human-readable and machine-readable data about the British Civil Wars. This didn’t just come from nowhere. These are some other projects I’ve been involved with that helped me to come up with this idea and gain the skills to put it into practice. Continue reading →