Semantic MediaWiki 0.4 changes

The following is a list of changes implemented for Semantic MediaWiki version 0.4, released on May 12 2006.

Version 0.4
The following provides a log of the newly introduced features and changes. In addition, various bugs have been closed.

Searching and querying
Users write queries in article source, and results are shown in the article.

Database more efficient now. Changes include: article IDs as indexed keys, additional numerical version for scalar datatype values, and tables of type InnoDB, all fields of type TEXT converted to VARCHAR. Also, the database fields were renamed for more consistency. The old tables are updated without losing data via Special:SWMAdmin. All search and retrieval functions have been modified accordingly.

The following fields now also have indexes: in smw_attributes attribute_title, value_num and value_xsd; in smw_relations relation_title and object_title. This should further boost up querying speed considerably.

If a relation points to a redirect, the queries know also returns answers about the redirected object.

Query results currently are updated only on parsing. Added refresh tab for explicit update.

Magic words like PAGENAME now work in ask-queries.

External services and reuse
This feature was switched off due to internal optimisations. Categories now come directly from MediaWiki's category table.

The import of outside ontologies is possible. It adds missing statements from an ontology to the wiki.

Datatype support
Add Mass and Time (intervals, not dates) float types; add additional units.

Using PHP's strtotime to parse 1970-02-01, 02/01/70, 1970-02-01T14:03:42, etc. Probably has timezone bugs.

Interface improvements
Both specials now show information about the number of uses of a given relation/attribute, similar to Special:Categories.

Provide info on datatypes, from $smwTypeHandlersByID global, smw_attributes table, and/or Type: wiki pages

Currently, empty infoboxes appear far too often, up to breaking the gallery feature. It is now possible to switch off all infoboxes, or to switch off all empty infoboxes. The latter is the default setting, because of said problems with galleries.

Bugfixes/Cleanup
Works now. In addtion, SearchTriple also works in configurations where "?title=" is the normal way of constructing URLs (especially if PHP is run via CGI this might be required). Note that this configuration still fails for various built-in MediaWiki specials ;-).