SMWCon Spring 2015/Cargo and the future of SMW

The Cargo MediaWiki extension was released in January 2015; it was consciously designed to serve as an alternative to not just Semantic MediaWiki, but also a whole host of its spinoff extensions: Semantic Result Formats, Semantic Compound Queries, Semantic Internal Objects, Semantic Maps, Maps and Semantic Drilldown. What makes the whole thing even more awkward is that its author, Yaron Koren, who is also giving this talk, is one of the main developers of, and evangelists for, the overall SMW system. (Feel free to bring tomatoes to throw at Yaron during the Q&A period.) Cargo makes use of standard database tables, instead of triples, to store its data; and its query language is much more directly a wrapper on top of SQL. This difference in storage and querying allows the Cargo code to be much simpler than that of SMW, and its querying is more powerful in some ways due to the power of SQL.

This talk will explain the thinking behind Cargo, and how it differs from Semantic MediaWiki; and how in other ways it's quite similar. There will also be a demonstration of Cargo in action. Finally the talk will discuss what the presence of Cargo might mean for the SMW software and, perhaps more importantly, for the SMW community.