SemanticMediaWiki
SemanticMediaWiki is a MediaWiki extension.
- Main purpose: Associate semantic properties with wiki pages, and various features based on it.
- Repository: https://github.com/mediawiki4intranet/SemanticMediaWiki
- Homepage: http://semantic-mediawiki.org, SemanticMediaWiki on mediawiki.org
- License: GPLv2.0+
- Created: 2006-08-22
- Our rating: May be useful (3)
Status for Mediawiki4Intranet distribution:
- Inclusion date: 2012-12-12
- Included version: 2.3.x
- Improvement status: Forked in MediaWiki4Intranet with major improvements
Usage note
It seems almost nobody uses SMW for its original ideas (semantic web, rdf, ontologies and etc) — everyone just uses it to be able to add properties to pages, create something like «object model», create Semantic Forms, use #ask queries as something like «sql» for objects and turn MediaWiki into a CMS.
But SMW is far from ideal for this purpose — it’s not that fast, properties are global (i.e. not specific to an object class), and the #ask query language is not so convenient… Usually it ends up with a massive amount of very ugly «Wiki-programming» efforts.
So, avoid massive usage of SMW if you can. If you still have to use it, check our improvements to it (see below).
Our improvements
- Query optimizer: identical subqueries are executed only once (for example, in <q>a OR b</q> <q>c OR d <q>a OR b</q></q> the «a OR b» part will be executed only once), identical terms are removed from conjunctions/disjunctions («a AND a», «a OR a» == just «a»).
- Negation operator support: syntax is {{#ask: [[prop::val]] !<q>...subquery...</q> }} or just {{#ask: [[prop::val]] ![[prop2::val2]] }}.
- Permission hook support (allows to use SMW, for example, with IntraACL).
- Fixed PostgreSQL support (may be merged into the next original release, 2.4).
- Fixed localised boolean value names (yes/no).
- Support for selection of property chains ({{#ask: ... | ?Prop1.Prop2}}) and sorting on them ({{#ask: ... | sort=Prop1.Prop2}}).
- LEFT JOINs on sort fields — pages without sort property do not disappear from query results anymore.
- Fixed fatal error when handling empty <info /> tag on wiki pages.
- Support long titles (up to 767 bytes), like in our Mediawiki4Intranet core patch.
- Bugfix for rebuildData.php: it didn’t accept --conf option.
- Internal bugfix for ParserData which allows other extensions to retrieve page SemanticData before saving it.
- Bugfix for count API requests.
- Add predefined properties for major modification date (i.e. the timestamp of latest non-minor revision), major revision comment, last revision comment. All are optional and must be enabled in $smwgPageSpecialProperties to work.