Semantic Media Wiki - making MediaWiki better

The Semantic Media Wiki is a plugin for the widly known Media Wiki software. In combination with the Semantic Forms plugin it brings the Media Wiki software to a complete new level. Here I just want to give a short overview why I think it is great. For a more detailed view, look at the extension pages.

The use case my department has is to collect information about data sets and create lists of them depending on their attributes.

Media Wiki

In a normal Media Wiki templates would be used to get a similar amount of information for each data set, and subsequently the lists would be manually updated after each creation or update of a data set.
This means a lot of work to keep the lists up to date and also the outfilling of a template is not very user friendly.

Media Wiki with Semantic Media Wiki and Semantic Forms plugin

With the Semantic Forms plugin forms can be created which assist the user to fill in a template. Therefore first in the template a predicate is defined for each variable, which has a type (Text, String, Number, Boolean, Page, Date, ...) and can be restricted to a given set of value (Enum).
Based on the type of the type of the predicate, the input field in the form is pictured (Textbox, Date Picker, Checkbox, DropDown, ...).
By saving the form, the data is stored in the template whereby the values of the variables is connected to the prediactes.
These predicates now can be used in queries to create dynamic lists.

In the use case of my department the form/template has fields for the owner of the data (Page, Textfield), the license it is under (String, Textfield) and of which type it is (String Enum, DropDown). Out of two different lists are created. Once the one for all data sets, to give an overview, and once a set of lists which contain all data sets of one type.
The owner field is also reused in other categories like project and presentations. This enables us to present all things (data sets, projects and presentations) a person is the owner of on it's user page, by making the query part of a user page template.

As you see you not only can create lists for one category, but by reusing prediactes easily merge data out of the whole wiki. Just like in the semantic web... :)

For examples of the use of this plugins please see the http://hackerspaces.org wiki or the CCC Camp Wiki.