[ANN] Semantic MediaWiki 1.6.0 supports SPARQL 1.1 RDF stores

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). 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.
* 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).

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


-- 
Dr. Markus Krötzsch
Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
Room 306, Parks Road, OX1 3QD Oxford, United Kingdom
+44 (0)1865 283529               http://korrekt.org/

Received on Wednesday, 3 August 2011 17:06:27 UTC