Experiences on semantifying a Mediawiki for the biggest recource about Chinese rock music: rockinchina .com by René Pickhardt.
From the post:
During my trip in China I was visiting Beijing on two weekends and Maceau on another weekend. These trips have been mainly motivated to meet old friends. Especially the heads behind the biggest English resource of Chinese Rock music Rock in China who are Max-Leonhard von Schaper and the founder of the biggest Chinese Rock Print Magazin Yang Yu. After looking at their wiki which is pure gold in terms of content but consists mainly of plain text I introduced them the idea of putting semantics inside the project. While consulting them a little bit and pointing them to the right resources Max did basically the entire work (by taking a one month holiday from his job. Boy this is passion!).
I am very happy to anounce that the data of rock in china is published as linked open data and the process of semantifying the website is in great shape. In the following you can read about Max experiences doing the work. This is particularly interesting because Max has no scientific background in semantic technologies. So we can learn a lot on how to improve these technologies to be ready to be used by everybody:
Good to see that René hasn’t lost his touch for long blog titles. 😉
A very valuable lesson in the difficulties posed by current “semantic” technologies.
Max and company succeed, but only after heroic efforts.