DiscourseDB:About

From Discourse DB
Revision as of 01:57, September 19, 2007 by Yaron Koren (talk | contribs) (Updating to note Semantic Forms, only about four months too late)
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Welcome to Discourse DB.


Discourse DB is a new kind of site: a database that uses the power and ease-of-use of wiki technology to collect the opinions of the world's journalists and commentators about ongoing political events and issues. Finally, there is a true "opinion roundup" - a single destination where anyone can go to see the nature of the debate on any political issue, whether current or historic. And editing the data, or adding new data, is free, easy and open to the public.

You can find out information like:

Finally there is a true "opinion roundup" - a single destination where anyone can go to see the nature of the debate on any political issue, whether current or historic. And editing the data, or adding new data, is free, easy and open to the public.

The site is also a queriable database, with an export of its data (in RDF format) available for querying by outside systems. For an illustration of this capability, see the Discourse DB analysis page.

Discourse DB is powered by MediaWiki, along with the two MediaWiki extensions Semantic MediaWiki and Semantic Forms. Discourse DB is closely affiliated with the Semantic Forms extension; Semantic Forms was originally developed for use on this site.

Discourse DB was created and is run by Nick Grandy and Yaron Koren. It was first released to the public in September 2006. You can reach the creators individually at their user pages, or collectively at admin@discoursedb.org.

Currently Discourse DB is available only in the English language. If you would like to help start a branch of the site in another language, we would like to hear from you (no programming knowledge is required); please send an email to admin@discoursedb.org.

You can read more, including what Discourse DB is not, and general help for the entire site.