Semantic MediaWiki 0.6 changes

From semantic-mediawiki.org

The following is a list of changes implemented for Semantic MediaWiki version 0.6.

Version 0.6[edit]

Searching and querying[edit]

✅ Users write queries in article source, and results are shown in the article. ✅Templates can now be used for constructing queries. It remains to enable output formatting based on templates as well.
✅A new Special:Ask ("Semantic search") allows users to directly ask semantic queries. Result pages simplify browsing. Sorting now is supported as well.
✅Inline queries that did not show all available results will now display a link to Special:Ask which will execute the same query and allow the user to browse all results. Th new parameter "searchlabel" can be used to customise the appearance of the link (if empty, no search link will be shown).
✅The formatting of result for inline queries has turned out to be too inflexible. For instance, one could not prevent empty () being shown if queries in list-format had not values in certain columns. A completely new implementation greatly enhances the options, and will simplify implementation of Timeline support.

✅ Inline queries now have a format that renders results in a JavaScript timeline.
✅Try to eliminate all FIXMEs.

External services and reuse[edit]

✅ Rewrite good portions of the RDF export to become more performant and easier to maintain. ✅ A maintenace script for creating a full export is provided, so that automatic (e.g. Cron-based daily or weekly) full RDF dumps can be generated. Future extensions of the scripts should enable category-based partial export.
✅ The wiki currently does not prevent "meta-modelling" in the sense that cateories and other annotations can again be annotated. To enable compatibility with OWL-based tools, it should be possible to constrain output to be in OWL, even if the wiki is not. This is currently done by just dropping offensive annotations, but further improvements are planned.
✅ RDF export can create browsable RDF for most statements, including categories.

Interface improvements[edit]

✅It was found to be necessary to configure the links to online maps shown for geographic coordinates in the factbox. This is now over-achieved by the new system for service links, that allows flexible integration of external webservices for specific attributes.

✅The headers for <ask> queries now link to the respective attributes and relations. The interactive sorting is triggered by a new button above each column. Especially, sorting for unlabeled (first) columns now is more user-friendly. Moreover, the headers="none" option works with tables as well.

The headers option of inline queries should support "hide", "link", "nolink" (instead of "hide" and anything else). Should we have different defaults for tables and lists?