The Observatory
 | |
| Status | public |
| Table of Contents | |
|---|---|
The Observatory
EDITThe Observatory is a free digital education resource. It offers the public useful information to help them both better understand today’s issues and navigate life in the modern world.
Involved with this wiki? Write a feature or story about your semantic experiences
Workflow[edit]
Technically, the Observatory consists of two independent wikis:
- Magazine: a publicly accessible, “read-only” wiki that delivers published content worldwide. It is optimized for speed and equipped with tools that showcase the content while ensuring a comfortable user experience. Its ultimate goal is to serve as an audience-supported educational resource that can make a difference.
- Editorial: a free-access wiki maintained privately by a team of expert contributors. Anyone may request an account to join as a contributor. It supports editorial workflows including permissions management, drafting, quality assurance, and publishing.
While the magazine wiki is not publicly editable, its doors are open: the site is designed to incorporate reader feedback, and for input and collaboration with volunteer researchers and editors.
Visitors engage with the Observatory:
- Via Search/Drilldown: For expertise by keyword, topic area, author, or publisher.
- Via Guides: To get the big picture.
The Observatory uses Semantic ACL to fine-tune permissions on the editorial wiki and Push to deliver articles to the public wiki.
Semantic MediaWiki[edit]
The Observatory uses SemanticMediaWiki (SMW) to manage different types of pages across both wikis, including:
SMW provides metadata management and query tools that enable the creation of dynamic listings such as:
- Featured Guides, Articles, and Authors
- New Additions
- Random Content
- Articles and Authors Associated With a Specific Area
- Articles With Similar Tags
- Related Reads
- Articles That Are Part of a Guide — curated collections of selected Articles
- Maps of Geo-Tagged Articles
Internally, SemanticMediaWiki also powers interface features for browsing Areas, such as:
In combination with the Page Forms, SMW offers powerful tools for managing detailed Author profiles and other semantic structures.
The wiki uses the Chameleon skin. Internal data processing and interface functionalities are implemented as Lua modules, utilizing the Semantic Scribunto libraries.
The Observatory team would like to express heartfelt thanks to the developers of their respective extensions and skins for their dedication and contributions.
