Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.5

Version 1.5.5 of Semantic MediaWiki is the next minor release after SMW 1.5.4 that brings several improvements to the RDF export capabilities and addresses a number of bugs.

Upgrading existing installations
Installations of SMW 1.5.x can be upgraded by just replacing the files (but note that you need to run MediaWiki 1.15 or greater now; this is strongly recommended anyway). This release is backward compatible with 1.5.4, so all extensions working with 1.5.4 should also work fine with 1.5.5. If problems do occur, it is possible to go back to 1.5.x by simply using the old files, and waiting with the upgrade until the relevant extensions provide updates.

It is suggested to change the inclusion of SMW in LocalSettings.php to the following as described in the installation instructions above:

include_once("$IP/extensions/SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticMediaWiki.php");

Including SMW_Settings.php as in 1.5.0 and before will continue to work, but may be disabled in some future version.

For upgrading older versions, please see the installation instructions.

Turtle syntax support
The OWL/RDF export of SMW is now available in two syntactic forms: RDF/XML (as before) and Turtle (new). RDF/XML is still used by default, but RDF files that are shipped via Special:ExportRDF can be requested in Turtle format by appending the parameter syntax=turtle to the URL. There is currently no GUI option for this (triggering RDF export through the GUI is not considered an important use-case).

OWL/RDF query format
It is now possible to retrieve query results of inline queries in OWL/RDF format, similar to the format used in the existing export. To enable this, format=rdf can be used with inline queries. This format also supports an optional parameter syntax that can be set to rdfxml (default) or turtle

More modular export code
The OWL/RDF serialisation and export code has been modularised to separate syntactic issues from export control. This simplifies the introduction of new syntactic forms as in the case of Turtle, and it prepares the architecture for future SPARQL support (where Turtle syntax is needed).

Bugfixes
SMW 1.5.5 closes a number of bugs that have been identified in earlier versions. The more noteworthy ones include:


 * Fixed a whitespace/newline issue when using the list format that was introduced in SMW 1.5.4.
 * Fixed DatatypeProperties that where being declared as ObjectProperties.
 * Fixed a problem with using large offsets in quries.

Extended translations
As usual, translations have been extended thanks to the Translatewiki.net project.