SMW 1.1 released: better querying, iCal, SPARQL, wiki registry

April 21 2008. The new version of Semantic MediaWiki, SMW 1.1, is now available for download. Upgrade from SMW 1.0(.1) is very simple and needs no special scripts, but you will need MediaWiki >=1.11 now. SMW1.1 was tested up to MW1.13 alpha. Besides the mandatory bugfixes, the new release brings various additional features.

• New iCalendar export for inline queries (format=icalendar). The result should contain printouts with labels "start", "end", or "location" for that to work, see e.g. http://semanticweb.org/wiki/ESWC2008.
• Support for formatted results on Special:Ask. "Further results" links from inline queries now preserve the format.
• Query results can now be sorted by more than one property (just separate property names with "," in sort parameter).
• Initial support (beta) for synching external RDF stores with SMW (currently only bindings for RAP exist). This also provides support for wiki-based SPARQL query services, see Help:SPARQL endpoint for details.
• More robust link generation code; even long query texts and links that contain very special characters are built properly.
• Extended translations. Completely new Arab translation.

There is also a new registry service for semantic wikis that is intended to replace the hand-crafted list of "sites using SMW" (the online interface is still somewhat simple, but the registry works well; better listing options will follow later). Feel free to announce your wiki (of course, no private data is collected; works only for public wikis anyway).

This release again includes much input from contributors and users. Thank you! We are also grateful for support by FZI Karlsruhe, SAP Research, the EU Integrated Project "Active", and the Betawiki project.