SMWCon Fall 2016/semantic core - A look back into seven years of Enterprise Class MediaWiki and an outlook into the future

Inspired by the great (and still current) talk "Where is Your Knowledge? – Semantic Wikis and Beyond" of Markus Krötzsch, I added "semantics" to my first MediaWiki in an enterprise context in 2008. The use case at that time was requirements management for a leading software company in the printing, publishing and media industry. With the SMW powered wiki, I was able to reduce the time required for managing requirements by 20% while improving quality through form based requirements templates. On the one hand, this setup had a high demand for a stable and sustainable software and data stack and on the other, a high demand for flexible and fast way to integrate new and missing features. The setup was a straight forward, a typical LAMP stack, manually maintained. You can imagine that a lot of "love" was required to make this setup LTS-style and agile at the same time...

In this talk, I will tell you the story of, our SMW distribution born from the enterprise and built for the enterprise. Since its first release in 2011 a lot of things changed. In the meanwhile, the complete build process is automated, idempotent and available for Ubuntu LTS, Debian, OpenSuse and SLES operating systems. This gives us the ability to create rock-solid SMW deployments from single-instance environments to multi-instance environments with hundreds of boxes, e.g. in an industrial context using our wikiboxx.