Discuss visualization/result format mechanism

[krabina]

Issue to discuss query result visualizations, starting with investigation of using a generic system rather than building dedicated formats like SMW has.

[krabina]

Let me start by giving you pointers how this is done in SMW.
Inline queries have a format= parameter. Usually it will be a plain list, but can be format=table, format=ul in order to have different ways of displaying the query result.
Also there are dedicated visualzations like format=map, calendar, gannt, jqplotchart, d3 etc.
Futhermore, some result formats don't display anything rather than a link. These are for downloading the data iin specific formats like RDF, JSON, CSV, etc.

Documentation is here:
https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Result_formats
some of the result formats are implemented in SMW core, most of them in the separate extension "Semantic Result Formats" and others are implemented in separate extensions.

Examples

• Network
• ModernTimeline

Some extensions also work standalone, withouth SMW, but also do have support for SMW in case it is present:

• Maps

One important aspect is that most of the result format also support a "template" parameter allowing to pass the results through a template for further formatting or processing.

@JeroenDeDauw mentioned that we should look into a more generic way of providing visualizations.

One aspect of this is that sometimes you would use the ask query not via a result format, but just to fetch the page names/proprties to be used in the visualization. This also works for non-semantic extensions.

E. g. the Knowledge Graph extension uses a parser function with a page name:

{{#knowledgegraph:
nodes=Page A, Page B
}}

now you can do something like

{{#knowledgegraph:
nodes={{#ask: [[Kategorie:Cities]]|format=plainlist|link=none|limit=100}}
}}

To get all nodes, separated by commas that are wiki page names of pages in the category city.

This way, you don't need to implement a separate result format to be used in the query.