International Center For Computational Logic

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International Center For Computational Logic
Image for International Center For Computational Logic
Statistics (2015/04/21)
Pages: 6000
Users: 42 (11 active)
Properties: 330
Categories: 30
Templates: 265
Forms: 27
Wikiapiary: Link
Table of Contents

The International Center for Computational Logic is an interdisciplinary center of teaching and research in the field of computational logic, founded in October 2003 at Technische Universität Dresden in Germany. Its homepage is a Semantic MediaWiki-based wiki and has been in existence since October 2014.

The concept of the site is based on the AIFB Portal, which was the SMW wiki of the month in November 2010. However, it features many technical innovations beyond the earlier wiki.

Editing is only possible for registered users, but all page sources can be viewed by appending "?action=edit" to URLs as usual.

Typical content and pages[edit]

The page is heavily based on forms and templates. Some of the main forms of content are:

  • Persons, such as [1]
  • Research groups, such as [2]
  • Publications, such as [3]
  • Lectures, such as [4]

There are a number of other content types that are used as well, but the above make up most of the site's content.

Skin[edit]

The ICCL wiki uses the Chameleon skin, with extensive use of Bootstrap layouts. It includes several custom MediaWiki extensions to improve the display, including the carousel on the start page, tabs, as well as the drop-down navigation interface seen on most pages, which is responsive (displays well for different browser widths). In general, the site is fully mobile-friendly.

Two-language support[edit]

The wiki can be fully read in both German and English; a link at the top of each page lets users switch between languages. Providing this support required custom code to ensure that all aspects of the wiki (navigation, main page, page contents, HTML headers, etc.) can be read in both languages.

This kind of language support is based on a fixed naming scheme for pages: English page names are always called like their German counterparts, but with "/en" appended to the page title. This makes it easier to create links to pages in the other language, but it also requires both pages to exists in all cases for this to work. The extension AutoCreatePage, which was created for this wiki, is used to create pages automatically whenever new content is added with templates/forms (which is mostly the way in which content is added).

English pages in many cases are not just auto-created but also automatically filled with content that is defined on the German page (using SMW properties) and retrieved using inline queries. This ensures that most content is entered only once, with the exception of texts. MediaWiki's own facilities for changing the displayed title of pages are used to ensure that the English page has the proper title (i.e., not "German title/en").

Navigation[edit]

The ICCL wiki largely deviates from MediaWiki's static navigation. Instead, all side-column navigation (usually on the left of pages) is created by the pages in the wiki themselves (using templates). This requires some small extensions to allow for moving, hiding or changing the main title of the page, so that it does not take over too much of the page. Using SMW, the navigation can be highly adaptive to wiki and page contents.

Examples:

GraphScope Semantic Search[edit]

The default text search of MediaWiki has been replaced by an intelligent search interface GraphScope that takes both semantic properties and text content into account. This is provided as a service by SearchHaus. The search special page contains a number of examples for searches with GraphScope.

Schema.org support[edit]

The site embeds schema.org annotations in some of its pages in order to improve the understanding of search engines crawling the site. For example, all person pages provide "semantic" content in this format. The embedding is done using microdata, since RDFa did not seem to work with MediaWiki right now.

Other customizations[edit]

The ICCL wiki also includes new Bibtex export result format for SMW that handles Unicode characters (translating them to LaTeX commands) and uses the MediaWiki GeSHI support for highlighting. See, e.g., https://ddll.inf.tu-dresden.de/web/Article4002/en