Just got a mail (by Thomas Nicolai) that the University of St.Gallen are launching their research platform "Alexandria" today.

While it doesn't look spectacular at first glance, from the inside there's supposed to be some sweet pieces: They use the inofficial MySQL5 XPath support and query Wikipedia through some secret web services interface! The PHP sources are to be published under the LGPL. Now that sounds sweet.

Update: The WS interface to Mediawiki is not a secret, but it ain't active in Wikipedia. Nicolai just adapted it to PHP5 and runs his queries against a local mirror. He will tell about the experiences in this project in an upcoming PHPUG Meeting.