SMWCon Fall 2013/SmartCore – Managing SMW content structure for dummies

SMW enables you to structure the content of your wiki by using forms and templates. However, creating and maintaining these is cumbersome since wiki code is not very user friendly. SmartCore™ enables you to manage your content structure (classes, properties and relations) as if it were plain content itself – and in fact it is plain content! Changes (such as adding a property) can be made on the fly and will be reflected immediately in forms and content pages. To use SmartCore™ you don’t need programming any wiki code. No pipes, no curly braces, etc. And since the SmartCore™ code itself consists of wiki content, it is fully configurable without any php programming.

Apart from being a useful enhancement to SMW, the Smartcore project is an interesting example of using (and even stretching) the nearly unlimited possibilities of SMW.

Topics treated:
 * Architecture of SmartCore™ Smartcore consists of a set of predefined SMW templates, forms and properties which are used to define the content structure of a wiki (i.e. to define classes, properties and relations). In addition, smartcore provides a dynamic semantic form and template for creating the actual end-user wiki content in accordance with the self-defined content structure. Furthermore, smartcore provides some additional templates for a.o. automatically showing content classes in the sidebar.
 * Interesting details To make smartcore work, we have had to overcome some specific difficulties in SMW such as how to make semantic forms truly dynamic. I'd like to share these with the audience and get response. You might call this 'lessons learned'.
 * Walkthrough I'll show how smartcore works in real life by defining a new content structure and creating some content. I will also show dynamically changing the content strcture.
 * Real-life example I will show a real life example of an operational wiki using Smartcore for dynamic content structure management.
 * Future of content structure management Conceptually, Smartcore is a workaround for not having a perfect solution for content structure management. So finally I would like to share and discuss some thoughts on how content structures would best be defined and managed using standards such as RDF/OWL. I also want to ask if there would be any interest in having Smartcore available as open source.