On 8/3/11 1:06 PM, Markus Krötzsch wrote:
We are happy to announce the new major release
SMW 1.6.0
Semantic MediaWiki
http://semantic-mediawiki.org/
SMW is a popular free and open source content management system based
on the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia [1]. It adds
capabilities of semantic data management, querying, and export. Many
extensions to SMW are available for adding further features ranging
from faceted data browsing to RDFa support.
SMW 1.6 newly adds support for using SPARQL-compatible RDF stores for
managing data (including query answering).
So you mean: SMW is no longer inextricably bound to MySQL? I can just
point it to a SPARQL compliant DBMS?
This is possible by exploiting the new SPARQL 1.1 Update capabilities
for writing, and SPARQL Query for accessing semantic data. See [2] for
details. Completely rewiring SMW queries to SPARQL requires many
different SPARQL features which is an interesting testbed for RDF
stores. The main system used for development was 4Store which worked
quite well. Virtuoso has been tested successfully too, but the graph
support in SMW is currently a bit limited so adjustments are needed
there (will be fixed in upcoming versions). Feedback on experiences
with other RDF stores in combination with SMW is welcome.
Other changes in SMW 1.6.0 include:
* Added UNIX-style DSV (Delimiter-separated values) result format.
* Added full support for PostgreSQL database backends.
Hmm. does this mean MySQL and PostgreSQL as opposed to ODBC accessible
RDBMS backends? If so, why? It just doesn't need to be so ODBC is
actually more powerful than any native RDBMS specific API, and
substantially so.
* Reworked internal data model.
* Changed the way in which units of measurement work. Type:Number now
does not accept any units, and a new type "Quantity" is used for
numbers with units.
* The declaration of Type:Record properties has changed. Instead of a
list of datatypes, the declaration now requires a list of properties
that are to be used for the fields of the record.
* Introduced pre-defined builtin properties for every datatype.
* Fixed escaping issues in the JSON result format.
For further details see [3].
It is planned to further extend the SPARQL support for SMW, first by
adding special handling to exploit features of important RDF stores
(e.g. there already is special code for 4Store that exploits its
resource limit features). Moreover, connectivity to other external
SPARQL endpoints might be added (given that SMW already includes a
SPARQL result parser and a SPARQL query builder).
You have to make a loosely coupled solution. The technology
infrastructure is in place.
You should be able to speak about SMW without provisos for: 4Store,
Virtuoso, MySQL, PostgreSQL. It is a chunk functionality that doesn't
need an DBMS (graph or relational) backend specificity.
Anyway, I'll take a look at what can be done re. this critical final
mile decoupling :-)
Anyway, thanks for the significant improvements as outline above, still
a zillion times better than the old architecture.
Kingsley
To keep up to date with SMW developments, you can follow the SMW
Twitter [4] or Indenti.ca [5], or register to our mailing lists [6].
Markus
P.S. Apologies if you received multiple copies of this email.
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/
[2] http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Using_SPARQL_and_RDF_stores
[3] http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki_1.6
[4] https://twitter.com/#!/SemanticWiki
[5] https://identi.ca/smw
[6] http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Getting_support
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President& CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
