Product Code Database
An infobox is a digital or physical table used to collect and present a subset of information about its subject, such as a document. It is a structured document containing a set of attribute–value pairs, and in Wikipedia represents a summary of information about the subject of an article. In this way, they are comparable to data tables in some aspects. When presented within the larger document it summarizes, an infobox is often presented in a sidebar format.
An infobox may be implemented in another document by transclusion it into that document and specifying some or all of the attribute–value pairs associated with that infobox, known as parameterization.
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| The infobox used on Wikipedia food-related articles, with no values specified for its parameters (attributes). | The same infobox as implemented in the article crostata. Values are to the right of the equals sign (=), and that the parameter names are the same as those in the specification for the infobox template. The values are in wiki markup: entries enclosed in square brackets (e.g. [[Tart]]) will be rendered as a link to the respective Wikipedia article (e.g. Tart), and the linked file will be transcluded into the article in place of its markup. |
On Wikipedia, an infobox is transcluded into an article by enclosing its name and attribute–value pairs within a double set of Curly bracket. The MediaWiki software on which Wikipedia operates then Parsing the document, for which the infobox and other templates are processed by a template processor. This is a template engine which produces a web document and a style sheet used for presentation of the document. This enables the design of the infobox to be separated from the content it manipulates; that is, the design of the template may be updated without affecting the information within it, and the new design will automatically propagate to all articles that transclude the infobox. Usually, infoboxes are Typesetting to appear in the top-right corner of a Wikipedia article in the desktop view, or at the top in the mobile view.
Placement of an infobox within the Wiki markup of an article is important for accessibility. A best practice is to place them following disambiguation templates (those that direct readers to articles about topics with similar names) and maintenance templates (such as that marking an article as unreferenced), but before all other content.The English Wikipedia policy about accessibility is specified in the Manual of Style/Accessibility. The policy about Wiki markup layout is specified at Manual of Style/Layout and Manual of Style/Lead section.
Baeza-Yates and King say that some editors find templates such as infoboxes complicated, as the template may hide text about a property or resource that the editor wishes to change; this is exacerbated by chained templates, that is templates transcluded within other templates.
As of August 2009, English Wikipedia used about infobox templates that collectively used more than attributes. Since then, many have been merged, to reduce redundancy. As of June 2013, there were at least transclusions of the parent , used by some, but not all, infoboxes, on articles.
The name of an Infobox is typically "Infobox genre"; however, widely used infoboxes may be assigned shorter names, such as "taxobox" for taxonomy.
Knowledge obtained by machine learning can be used to improve an article, such as by using automated software suggestions to editors for adding infobox data. The iPopulator project created a system to add a value to an article's infobox parameter via an automated parsing of the text of that article.
DBpedia uses structured content extracted from infoboxes by machine learning algorithms to create a resource of linked data in the Semantic Web; it has been described by Tim Berners-Lee as "one of the more famous" components of the linked data project.
Machine extraction creates a triple consisting of a subject, predicate or relation, and object. Each attribute-value pair of the infobox is used to create an RDF statement using an ontology. This is facilitated by the narrower gap between Wikipedia and an ontology than exists between unstructured or free text and an ontology.
The semantic relationship between the subject and object is established by the predicate. In the example infobox, the triple ("crostata", type, "tart") indicates that a crostata is a type of tart. The article's topic is used as the subject, the parameter name is used as the predicate, and the parameter's value as the object. Each type of infobox is mapped to an ontology class, and each property (parameter) within an infobox is mapped to an ontology property. These mappings are used when parsing a Wikipedia article to extract data.
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