Semantic Mediawiki 0.4 - Knowledge Inside!

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15 May 2006

Until now, Semantic MediaWiki was kind of a nerds project. Yes, you could get a lot of information out in RDF, and actually, I used it as an RDF editor more than once -- but heck, what normal person needs that?

Now, with the freshly implemented feature, the advantages of a Semantic MediaWiki over a normal MediaWiki should become obvious: you can simply ask the wiki for stuff! Wiki, what are the 10 biggest city in the US? Put a list here. Or, wiki, what is the height of the current German chancellor? Put the info here. I have made a writeup on those inline queries on our demo wiki. Go there, read it.

But a lot of other things made it into the 0.4 release. Here's Markus' list:

  • Improved output for Special:Relations and Special:Attributes: usage of
  • relations and attributes is now counted
  • Improved ontology import feature, allowing to import ontologies and to update existing pages with new ontological information
  • Experimental suport for date/time datatype
  • More datypes with units: mass and time duration
  • Support for EXP-notation with numbers, as e.g. 2.345e13. Improved number formating in infobox.
  • Configurable infobox: infobox can be hidden if empty, or switched off completely. This also works around a bug with MediaWiki galeries.
  • Prototype version of Special:Types, showing all available datatypes with their names in the current language setting.
  • "[[:located in::Paris]]" will now be rendered as "located in [[Paris]]"
  • More efficient storage: changed database layout, indexes for fast search
  • Code cleaned up, new style guidelines
  • Bugfixes, a lot of Bugixes

Thanks to everyone who contributed and still contributes to the project! And, connected to this, thanks to the answers to my last blog entry -- I will write more on this tomorrow.


Originally published on Semantic Nodix

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