Semantic MediaWiki 1.3 released: improved browsing interfaces, query caching
Sep 7 2008. The SMW Project is happy to announce the release of the new Semantic MediaWiki 1.3.0. The new version introduces a number of new features and general improvements. Upgrading from Semantic MediaWiki 1.2.0 requires only little effort, but it is still recommended to read the installation and upgrade instructions.
As detailed in this wiki, SMW 1.3 brings three different improvements for browsing semantic data:
- Special:Browse is more usable and more concise.
- Searching for property values now offers a "fuzzy" search that allows you to jump to pages with "nearby" values when a search has only few results, like in this example.
- Concept pages now offer a browsing mechanism similar to categories, like in this example. Result paging allows to show even large numbers of results on the wiki page.
With the improvement of Special:Browse, SMW no longer will display a Factbox by default but instead shows a toolbox link for displaying all property data. Both functions can be configured to achieve the old behaviour if desired.
Moreover, a new mechanism for pre-computing concepts has been introduced to speed up this form of semantic queries even on very large wikis.
As usual, SMW 1.3 also closes a number of bugs with earlier versions, and further extends the language support of SMW (thanks to the BetaWiki project!). The online documentation on this site has already largely been updated to the new version.
