As we plan to release SMW 1.2 in the next weeks, it is time for me to provide a preview of intended new features.
== New Store == As a major change, there will be a new storage backend implementation with completely new internals. From a user viewpoint this means: * most operations, especially queries, are faster, * full top-level disjunctions in queries will work using the keyword "OR" (this can be disabled if desired), * full equality support (based on redirects) will be the default, and it will not have major performance impacts, * caching and optimisation strategies for Very Large Wikis to increase performance for applications with large categories, * some specific performance issues are alleviated (Special pages), * annotated interwiki links are likely to be supported. The general performance gain will hopefully let you use larger and more powerful queries, which you did not dare to use now, or that really ran too slow on your site. I know that many people care little about actual *speed* but rather about query power, but this is really the same in many cases. The downside of this is that you will have to run the update script to initialise the new store after upgrade. Alternatively, the old store will still be available as an option, but without the new features. From a developer's viewpoint, not much should change. Most of the API is completely untouched. A separate email on the devel list will sum up the changes later on. If you still use code with explicit SQL queries to smw-tables, reconsider. We expect most SMW extensions to be able to adopt to the new version quickly or to just work right away. PostgreSQL compatibility is still not checked (the old store should work there, though). I will inform the developers once the new DB layout is somewhat more stable to ask for support on that issue. == Other features == Another important new feature are automatic updates. Currently, if you create an annotation, and then edit the property (e.g. change its datatype), then the old annotation is not updated. The new version will take care of this. A similar feature is in place for semantic templates: if a template is changed, affected pages will automatically update as well. Various minor extensions in query expressivity are also on our list, and there are some patches to include as well. Better query printout control is one thing, another are inverse properties and (closed world) negation in queries, but it is not clear yet whether this will be quite ready for this release. Of course there will also be much new/extended translations, adjustments to fully support the upcoming MediaWiki 1.13, and various bugfixes. == SVN Warning == The development version of SMW will soon be updated to use the new store by default. This may be slightly experimental at first, and in any case you must run the usual refresh script to make it work initially (see INSTALL for details). It is also possible to drop the old storage DB tables to free up memory, but there is no simple script/admin function for that yet. == Outlook == We intend to go for further expressive features in upcoming releases. Examples are transitive properties and other "rules", in combination with a caching architecture that allows these more challenging features to work in practice. We also still plan to provide a better implementation of Type:Date (the cleaner DB implementation will help there too), some new query printers, and support for MediaWiki specific attributes such as page modification time in queries. Cheers, Markus -- Markus Krötzsch Semantic MediaWiki http://semantic-mediawiki.org http://korrekt.org [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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