Hi all, Denny and I have been hard to communicate with recently, mostly due to our high workloads. Please bear with us. I will now take some time to shed some light on the upcoming SMW 1.0 release.
[In all feature description below, the keyword "will" is used to describe
features that are not implemented in SVN yet, but that are planned for 1.0.]
== Main visible changes ==
(1) "Relations" and "Attributes" are joined and become "Properties"
* The "default type" of a (untyped or nonexisting) property is "Page", i.e.
such properties just behave like relations in SMW 0.7
* You can continue to use "::" and ":=", but there is no difference. We
suggest "::", since it can be used in template parameters where "=" is
problematic.
* The former syntactic hint that "::" is a link while ":=" is not has thus
been given up, but this distinction got heavily diluted recently by more
elaborate datatypes anyway. Also, many users had problems of distinguishing
the two things.
* The Special pages are simplified -- basically half of them is gone.
NOTE: the word "property" is the nicest thing we could come up with for
English (its a technical term anyway, but better ideas could be taken into
account). It also resembles common Semantic Web speak. Other languages do not
have this bias and can seek better terms if they like. For example, I think
that German SMW will use "Attribut" since "Eigenschaft" ("Property" in
German) sounds queerer.
(2) Novel, more versatile tooltips
* Tooltips now can be inserted much easier into many places, and SMW makes use
of this possibility a lot.
* Error messages in the factbox now become tooltips, and there will be the
option of displaying these error messages even inline in little tooltips
(useful if you disable the Factbox).
* Various hints are shown in tooltips. For instance, queries now use tooltips
for showing problems (e.g. if you typed some query that SMW did not
understand properly, SMW will give a small warning instead of just showing
unexpected results).
(3) Significant speed-up
* SMW 0.7 was slow -- not because of heavy querying but because of the sheer
amounts of code being loaded all the time (shame on us).
* 1.0 loads significantly faster, yielding a noticable speedup in normal
operation
* Loading of JavaScripts will be controlled more carefully to prevent too much
single loading requests to the server per page view.
* Queries, when restricted to the query power of SMW0.7, should be faster.
(4) More powerful querying, more semantic expressivity
* Queries now are really *parsed* and *preprocessed* before being executed.
This enables much cleaner handling and new features.
* Queries support disjunctions everywhere.
* Queries support value inequality ("search for all pages with a population
that is unequal to '50000'" -- useless example, but you get the point). Note
that this has nothing to do with negation.
* Subproperty statements are supported, and are taken into account for
querying.
* Redirects work like equality even on subqueries.
* Queries report all errors and problems that occurred from parsing over
preprocessing to execution. For example, if you use a query that is bigger
than the configuration of the site allows, you will see a warning (this was a
source for much confusion before).
(5) Improved display of datatypes
* Data values used for semantic annotation now have more control over their
display. In particular, HTML and Wiki versions of a datavalue are separated.
This will enable things like linked URLs to work properly (you will not
see "[http://... ]" in query results anymore).
(6) N-ary datatypes
* There has been discussion about this already, and I will write an extra mail
on this. For now just note that (a) naries do not support all features and
datatypes yet, (b) naries are distinct from "subpages" (groups of annotations
that are, well, grouped), (c) the availability of naries *now* does not
preclude the addition of grouped annotations *later*, and both things have
different uses.
(7) Ontology import revived
* Well, some people wanted it, here it is. We still do not really recommend
it, since it cannot create meaningful page contents but just empty pages with
annotations.
* But it is smart enough not to duplicate existing annotations.
(8) Nl language translation (thanks to Siebrand Mazeland)
(9) A completely new set of bugs (many old bugs gone, many new introduced).
Finally, we were rightly asked to provide a parser function for <ask>
(something like {{#ask|...}}). This would yield full template compatibility.
The new "::" syntax is one step towards this, the better datavalue formatting
is another one. What is really missing is the conversion of HTML-query
outputs to wiki text. We still consider whether this is realistic for SMW
1.0 ... I will discuss this on the devel list.
== Main invisible changes ==
* Basically, almost everything was rewritten more or less completely, or will
be rewritten before the release. I will send details to the devel list soon.
Anyway, many changes should be convenient to developers of SMW-extensions,
but we are aware that more documentation is needed.
== When? When is the release? When can I safely use SVN? ==
We *want* to release SMW 1.0 around the first week of October. At least some
release candidate should be out by that time. Main open issues are:
* Upgrade path: the merger of Relations and Attributes requires you to merge
two namespaces. Basically, the Attribute namespace is automatically renamed
to "Property" but the pages from "Relation:" must be moved over. You can do
this manually or (with some care) on the database, but we would like to
provide you with some automated way of doing this. This is the main
show-stopper for SMW1.0.
* Bugs: there are some medium-sized issues that we definitely want to fix.
* Documentation: the docu is not complete yet.
* Internal changes: there are still a number of "old" files that ought to be
replaced by new implementations in SMW1.0 (though most of them already have).
This is a prerequisite for some bugfixes/improvements.
So should you upgrade to SVN? Well, you could, but note that there is no way
back to SMW 0.7 (especially the DB-layout changed). At least ontoworld and
various other wikis use the current alpha version and are working reasonably
well. You can use MediaWiki 1.10. To upgrade, you need to first go to
Special:SMWAdmin as usual, and press the button. If you have a large wiki,
this may take some time, and you should better use our new maintenance script
SMW_setup.php. Next you should run the maintenance script
SMW_refreshData.php, maybe twice (on large wikis, run it only for properties
first, see docu in the script file). Finally you can bother how to get your
Relation-pages ("Relation:" still exists) into "Property:". This is not
critical for the wiki to work, but you get a lot of red links in the Factbox.
Also, if your wiki is large, you may want to restrict the new query
expressivity. See the parameters in SMW_Settings.php (copy your own settings
to LocalSettings.php). Especially equality (redirects) and subproperty
queries in combination tend to puzzle MySQL, possibly leading to long query
times. We look out for further optimisation before releasing.
== What is it with this Halo-Project? ==
As some of you may know, we are employing and extending SMW within a project
called "Halo", together with the company ontoprise. Our work on many
SMW-features have been funded by this project, and these parts are just
included into SMW1.0.
Other features are more application-specific (Halo is targetting
knowledge-engineering in certain application domains in the natural
sciences), or tailored towards smaller wikis or specific tasks (e.g. the task
of adding inline annotations to otherwise finished pages). These parts of
Halo will be released as an extension package to SMW1.0, that can be
installed, enabled, and disabled at your liking. I assume that there will
also be a public demonstration wiki at some time. It is not clear at the
moment how and if these Halo extensions are going to be maintained beyond
SMW1.0, but they are all in the open source so that alignment with future SMW
releases should be possible. The targetted release date for the Halo
extensions is around Oct 15.
OK, you are now up-to-date concerning general SMW ongoings. I will answer
further specific questions in separate emails, especially on the devel list.
Cheers,
Markus
--
Markus Krötzsch
Institut AIFB, Universät Karlsruhe (TH), 76128 Karlsruhe
phone +49 (0)721 608 7362 fax +49 (0)721 608 5998
[EMAIL PROTECTED] www http://korrekt.org
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