Semantic MediaWiki 1.0 released

Dec 31 2007. The first stable version of Semantic MediaWiki, SMW 1.0, is now available for download. Among numerous improvements, it introduces semantic RSS feeds, that are the basis for this very news feed. Other highlights include a lot of performance improvements, much more powerful inline queries, and many beautifications.

New features at a glance

• Simplified semantic annotations: just one kind of annotation ("Property").
• Significant speedups for page rendering and loading
• Prettier and easier to understand interfaces
• Alternative inline query syntax {{#ask:...}}, fully compatible with

MediaWiki templates, template parameters, and other extensions

• Semantic RSS feeds: subscribe to your favourite query results
• More expressive semantic querying: class and property hierarchies, equality
• Pattern matching, disjunctions, and inequality in query conditions
• Fewer and simpler datatypes, more tolerant parsing
• Better media support: better treatment of links to Image: and Media:
• Better internationalisation, new languages: Dutch, Chinese
• Experimental n-ary properties for list-like property values
• Ontology import re-enabled (simple annotation import)
• Support for upcoming MediaWiki 1.12
• Many many bugfixes and improvements

View complete list of changes.

How to install/upgrade

SMW 1.0 requires MediaWiki of version 1.11 or greater (though 1.10 still work for the most part). Existing installations can easily be upgraded, and existing syntax will mostly continue to work as expected. Details on upgrade and installation are found in the documentation.

Any problems can be discussed on our user mailing list "semediawiki-user".

Acknowledgements

This release represents a major step in SMW development, and would not have been possible without a number of contributors, translators, and, of course, users, who have greatly aided the development of SMW. In addition, specific development tasks have been supported by the European Union within projects SEKT and NeOn, and by Vulcan Inc. and ontoprise GmbH within the Halo project. Thanks!

Finally, given that none of us accepts any donations, I would like to point out that the development of SMW hinges upon the established communities and experiences of the open content and free software movement. SMW would not have been possible without the continued activities from organisations such as the Wikimedia Foundation (obviously), but also the Free Software Foundation or Creative Commons (providing us developers with some legal safety). If you want to support SMW, please support those or similar organisations.

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