SMW Project

Table of Contents

Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an open-source project to which many people and organisations have contributed. The SMW project was founded by Markus Krötzsch and Denny Vrandečić during their work at the Institute AIFB at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) The current project maintainer is Jeroen De Dauw. Information on how to get in touch with the SMW project is found at the SMW contact page.

Project history

Semantic MediaWiki was first released on 30 September 2005. You can read the entire version history of SMW at Semantic MediaWiki version history.

Contributors

Development

• Core developers:

Jeroen De Dauw and others

James Hong Kong (past), Markus Krötzsch (past), Yaron Koren (past), Denny Vrandečić (past), Klaus Lassleben (past, funded by DocCheck GmbH)

• Code contributors:

Current contributors see GitHub

Past contributors: S Page, Kai Hüner, Fernando Correia, Nick Grandy, Thomas Bleher, Felix Kratzer, Jörg Heizmann, Daniel Herzig, Nikolas Iwan, Tobias Matzner, Daniel Friesen, Frank Dengler, Nathan R. Yergler, Fabian Howahl, Jie Bao, Marcel Gsteiger, Joel Natividad, Richard Cyganiak, Stephan Gambke, Nischay Nahata, Doug Beeson and many more

• Interface translation:

Community of Translatewiki.net; special thanks are due to Siebrand Mazeland, Niklas Laxström and the other staff members of translatewiki.net

• Pre-release testing:

Team of SMW Testers

• Original concept:

Heiko Haller, Markus Krötzsch, Max Völkel, Denny Vrandečić

• Extension developers: see extensions page.

Website and Documentation

• Editor in chief:

Karsten Hoffmeyer

• Editor, Wiki of the Month:

Yaron Koren (past), User:Dgennaro (past)

• Chief translators:

User:Saruman (Dutch - Nederlands)

Karsten Hoffmeyer (German - Deutsch)

User:Dick6809 (Japanese - 日本語)

Fabrice Lécaudé (French - Français)

Lin Zhang (Simplified Chinese - ‪中文(简体))

Yury Kaktov (Russian - Русский)

• Documentation authors: view list
• Webserver administration:

Karsten Hoffmeyer

Community support

• Social media administrators and moderators:

See semantic-mediawiki.org:Services accounts

• Mailing list moderators:

Jude Jonassaint, Scott Reed, Yaron Koren,

Dan Bolser (past), Kelly Bowles (past), Patrick Nagel (past)

• Mailing lists:

> 600 subscribers of the user mailing list (as of November 2015)

• OSDA Steering Committee:

Michael Cariaso, Jeroen De Dauw, Frank Dengler, Daniel Hansch, Karsten Hoffmeyer, Yaron Koren, Markus Krötzsch, Joel Natividad, Lydia Pintscher, Don Undeen, Denny Vrandečić

Artwork

• SMW logo design:

Alistair3149

Markus Krötzsch (past) (Wikipedia link ball, semantic flower),

Rozana Vrandecic (second generation link ball)

Projects and organisations supporting SMW

The Open Semantic Data Association, which has existed since August 2011, provides some financial and logistical support for Semantic MediaWiki, although it is not involved in coordinating the software's development.

The MediaWiki Stakeholder's Group has supported the organization of SMWCons since 2020.

Semantic MediaWiki core development was previously funded in part by the Institut AIFB of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

Specific development tasks have been carried out in a number of research and industry-based projects:

• European Union projects partly supporting further development of SMW include:
  • ACTIVE – Enabling the Knowledge Powered Enterprise (finished)
  • NeOn – Lifecycle Support for Networked Ontologies (finished)
  • SEKT – Semantically Enabled Knowledge Technologies (finished)
• DocCheck GmbH supported the first prototype development.
• HP Labs Palo Alto
• Milprog AG, Switzerland
• Ontoprise GmbH supported SMW in the context of Project Halo, funded by Vulcan Inc.
• WikiWorks has developed, and maintains, a number of SMW-based extensions

Credits to other software projects

• Naturally, Semantic MediaWiki is part of the MediaWiki project. Technical infrastructure and development support for MediaWiki is provided by the Wikimedia Foundation and a very large number of contributors and supporters.
• Semantic MediaWiki makes use of code libraries developed for Wikidata, a project run by Wikimedia Deutschland.
• Semantic MediaWiki uses the jQuery and jQuery UI Javascript libraries, which are included within MediaWiki. See also this page on plug-ins used by Semantic MediaWiki and related extensions.
• Many people have contributed to the project by providing helpful comments and suggestions. Among them are many people on the project mailing lists, and, previously, the members of the Semantic Wiki Interest Group and a number of anonymous reviewers. Thanks a lot!