Semantic search
NYCFacets wins NYC BigApps competition grand prize
April 17 2012. NYCFacets, a Semantic MediaWiki-based site that holds detailed information about the open data sets provided by New York City government agencies, won the grand prize of $10,000 at the 3rd annual NYC BigApps competition, a contest to find software applications that use New York City's open data in creative and useful ways. NYCFacets was among the few entrants that is not a consumer application, but rather a resource for other developers.
NYCFacets was created by Ontodia, a company run by longtime SMW community member Joel Natividad and Sami Baig.
NYCFacets makes significant use of Semantic MediaWiki and many of its related extensions. It was previously the SMW wiki of the month in March 2012.
Wikidata to Bring Semantic Data to Wikipedia
March 30 2012. The Wikidata project is a major effort to establish a platform for editing and sharing data among all Wikipedia communities. The project will start next Monday, 2 April 2012. Wikidata will draw from the experience of Semantic MediaWiki in managing data in wikis, and SMW maintainers Denny Vrandecic, Jeroen De Dauw, and Markus Krötzsch are closely involved. However, there will also be some important differences, e.g., regarding user interface and translation support. Technical details are published on the Wikidata pages and there is a dedicated Wikidata mailing list for updates and discussions. Official details about the project can be found in a recent press release by Wikimedia Deutschland e. V.: Data Revolution for Wikipedia.
Semantic MediaWiki 1.7.1 released
March 5 2012. Semantic MediaWiki 1.7.1, the next minor version after 1.7.0, has now been released. This new version adds a few cool new features and fixes a pile of bugs. Uprading from 1.7.0 can be done by replacing the files and running the database upgrade script. Upgrading from earlier versions of SMW is easy but needs some additional steps in certain cases, see Installation 1.7.1 for details. Further information can be found on the SMW 1.7.1 page.Chapter by Markus Krötzsch in new book, "Open Advice"
February 19 2012. Semantic MediaWiki lead developer Markus Krötzsch is the author of a chapter in the new book Open Advice, a compendium of advice about free and open-source development from various open-source leaders. In his chapter, titled "Out of the Lab, into the Wild: Growing Open Source Communities around Academic Projects", Markus talks about the steps academic researchers can take to help the open-source software that they have created succeed, including choosing popular technology, documenting the code, keeping all communication and development public, and publicizing the software.
Open Advice was edited by Lydia Pintscher, a member of the Semantic MediaWiki community (as well as of the open-source software KDE), and the book's authors include others with connections to MediaWiki, including Lydia herself, Wikimedia Foundation developer Guillaume Paumier, Wikipedia researcher Felipe Ortega, and Wikitravel (and StatusNet) founder Evan Prodromou. Open Advice is itself available under an open source license.
Semantic MediaWiki 1.7.1 beta
February 15 2012. The first beta release of Semantic MediaWiki 1.7.1, the next minor version after 1.7.0, is now available. This is a beta release and should not be used on production wikis! So far 1.7.1 brings a ton of bugfixes and some minor additions.Semantic MediaWiki 1.7.0 released
Jan 1 2012. Semantic MediaWiki 1.7.0, the next major version after 1.6.1, has now been released. This new version brings a significant number of internal changes and fixes. Notable additions are native subobjects, an Ask API and an alpha version of Special:QueryCreator. Upgrading from earlier versions of SMW is easy but needs some additional steps in certain cases, see Installation 1.7.0 for details. Further information can be found on the SMW 1.7.0 page.SMWCon Spring 2012 to be held in Carlsbad, California
November 30, 2011. The location and dates of the next SMWCon, or Semantic MediaWiki Conference, have been announced: it will be held at the Tri-City Wellness Center in Carlsbad, California, USA (a city located between San Diego and Los Angeles) on April 25-27, 2012. The event will be sponsored by ai-one, a San Diego software company. The first day will include tutorials for beginners to SMW; this will be followed by a two-day regular conference.
For more information, see the SMWCon Spring 2012 homepage.
SMWCon Fall 2011 talks and presentations on YouTube
November 1, 2011. Videos of talks and presentations from SMWCon Fall 2011, which was held on September 21-23 in Berlin, Germany, have been uploaded to YouTube. The entire set of links to the videos is viewable here. The event itself was a big success, with about 40 attendees representing developers and users from all over the world.
Wikimedia Deutschland is hiring for the Wikidata project
Oct 28 2011. Wikimedia Deutschland is hiring for the Wikidata project
Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, just started to hire for the new Wikidata project. Wikidata is a project aiming to create a common repository for information similar to the Wikimedia Commons repository of files. In this way it will be possible to integrate information like the number of inhabitants of Berlin into all language versions of an article automatically, rather than doing this manually as is the case now. Semantic MediaWiki is planned to be a main component of Wikidata. See here for the current job openings.
Recently the renowned German portal on information technology "heise online" published an article about the envisioned Wikidata project. Read the full story (German).Semantic MediaWiki celebrates its 6th anniversary
Sep 30 2011. Semantic MediaWiki celebrates its 6th anniversary
This day in 2005 the very first version of Semantic MediaWiki (SMW 0.1) was released. What started as an academic project has now evolved into a mature and serious software suite enhancing MediaWiki to take advantage of the possibilities provided by the Semantic Web. "Making your wiki more accessible - for humans and machines" was the principal idea of Semantic MediaWiki during these years, which will continue to accompany its further development.
Since Semantic MediaWiki 0.1 a lot of features have been added to the software, and just last week Semantic MediaWiki 1.6.2 was released. See the version history for more details. Also, many useful semantic extensions have been been created to provide extra functionality, most notably Semantic Forms, Semantic Result Formats and Halo.
Also an active community of both developers and users has established itself around Semantic MediaWiki and is still gaining momentum.Free Software Directory re-launched with Semantic MediaWiki
Sep 29 2011. Free Software Directory re-launched with Semantic MediaWiki
The Free Software Foundation, a pioneering organization best known for creating GNU as well as the GNU General Public License, has since 2002 also run the "Free Software Directory", a website listing free and open-source software. Today it re-launched the site as a wiki running Semantic MediaWiki, in order to allow users to directly add to and modify the site's contents, as well as to improve searching. In a press release, the FSF said the change will make the site "a more useful and current resource".
You can view the new Free Software Directory here.SMWCon Fall 2011 successfully held
Sep 23 2011. After three successful days SMWCon Fall 2011 ended
More that 40 users, developers and enthusiasts participated at SMWCon Fall 2011 in Berlin. It provided in the context of Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) an insight into Semantic Web technologies that empower linked data. Another main topic were the latest developments concerning SMW and related software itself. All of this was supplemented with inspiring examples of how to implement all of this.
The slides and documents are already available via the main conference page. Additionally, videos of the conference will be made available on YouTube later on.
A big thank you goes to all the people organising, supporting and attending this event. See you next SMWCon.Semantic MediaWiki 1.6.2 released
Sep 20 2011. Semantic MediaWiki 1.6.2 has been released and is now available for download. This minor release mainly contains bug fixes and some small new features and tweaks. See Installation 1.6.2 for installation details. Further information can be found on the SMW 1.6.2 page.Semantic MediaWiki 1.6.1 released
Aug 20 2011. Semantic MediaWiki 1.6.1 has been released and is now available for download. This minor release mainly contains bug fixes and function tweaks. See Installation 1.6.1 for installation details. Further information can be found on the SMW 1.6.1 page.SMWCon Fall 2011 registration now open
Aug 12, 2011. We are happy to announce that you can now register for SMWCon Fall 2011 in Berlin on September 21–23, 2011. Registration is found at http://de.amiando.com/SMWCon_Fall_2011. Read more …SNPedia-Gene Wiki mashup - joining two wikis via RDF and SPARQL using Semantic MediaWiki
August 10, 2011. The SNPedia-Gene Wiki mashup is the first known case of joining the information of two wikis via RDF and SPARQL using Semantic MediaWiki A paper was published by Benjamin M. Good, Salvatore Loguercio and Andrew I. Su describing how two wikis, SNPedia and Gene Wiki were used to integrate and assemble separately collected data into a "meta-wiki" by utilising the abilities of Semantic MediaWiki to handle the Resource Description Framework (RDF) via its standard query language SPARQL. Thus 4,426 distinct gene-disease relationships were captured between the two wikis. Read the full story at bio-ontologies.knowledgeblog.org.Semantic MediaWiki 1.6.0 released
July 30 2011. The new version of SMW, Semantic MediaWiki 1.6.0, has now been released. In this new major version, SMW has again seen a significant number of internal changes for better extendibility and less bugs. Notable changes are full support of synchronization of SMW with external RDF stores, major reorganization concerning datatypes (namespace Type abolished, no custom datatypes, changes to datatypes Number and Record, built in properties for every supported datatype), new built in result format DSV (Delimiter-separated values), improved error reporting for ask queries, improved support for PostgreSQL. Upgrading from earlier versions of SMW is easy but needs some additional steps in certain cases, see Installation 1.6.0 for details. Further information is found on the SMW 1.6.0 page.Call for presentations for SMWCon Fall 2011
July 25, 2011. SMWCon Fall 2011, the upcoming installment of SMWCon, or the Semantic MediaWiki Conference, to be held in Berlin, Germany on September 21-23, 2011, is looking for talks and presentations by all interested users and developers. Proposals for talks should be added to the list on the wiki page. Expert users can also propose tutorials, for the tutorial day on September 21.
SMW on Twitter and identi.ca
July 15, 2011. Semantic MediaWiki now has accounts on Twitter and identi.ca in order to provide more regular updates on SMW and its extensions. You can now follow us at Twitter and indenti.ca.
SMWCon Fall 2011 to be held in Berlin
June 13, 2011. The location and dates of the next SMWCon, or Semantic MediaWiki Conference, have been announced: it will be held at the Free University of Berlin in Berlin, Germany, on September 21-23, 2011. The event will be hosted by the Web-Based Systems Group headed by Dr. Christian Bizer, a group that is responsible for some of the most well-known projects of the Semantic Web, including DBpedia, a project that shares some of the same goals of Semantic MediaWiki. The first day will include tutorials for beginners to SMW, as well as discussions with developers for more advanced users; this will be followed by a two-day regular conference.
For more information, see the SMWCon Fall 2011 homepage.
SMWCon Spring 2011 talks on YouTube
May 23, 2011. Videos of talks from SMWCon Spring 2011, which was held on April 28-30 in Arlington, Virginia (near Washington, D.C.), have been uploaded to YouTube. The entire set of links to the videos is viewable here. The event itself was a success, with over 30 attendees representing developers and users from Washington, D.C., the rest of the United States, Europe and Asia.
Encyclopedia Dramatica, Oh Internet founder praises SMW
Apr 17 2011. An April 16 post on popular American news-and-gossip blog Gawker featured an interview with Sherrod DeGrippo, who founded the wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica in 2005 and last week turned the site into a redirect to her new wiki, Oh Internet. Oh Internet uses Semantic MediaWiki extensively, and DeGrippo cited SMW among the reasons why she made the replacement. DeGrippo called SMW "the best thing to ever happen to wikis. An amazing technology that allow for easier editing and querying... I am excited and I love it."
Read the entire post: "What Happened to Encyclopedia Dramatica?", Max Read, Gawker, Apr 16, 2011
Win prizes at Halo public testing
Apr 14 2011. Ontoprise is announcing a bug hunting competition for Halo. To prepare the upcoming release of Halo 1.5.3, users are asked to help with beta testing, and get the chance to win some cool prizes in exchange. More information can be found at the Halo 1.5.3 public testing homepage.
User consultation: How do you use RDF?
Mar 15 2011. The RDF export of SMW can be used in many ways to exchange data with other applications. In order to improve this feature, the SMW developers are asking for user feedback. How do you use RDF? Which tools are you using? Which other features would you like to see? To give your feedback, please answer this short (one-page) survey. All questions are optional, all feedback is welcome. Thanks for helping us to make SMW better!
Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.6 released
Feb 24 2011. Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.6 has been released and is now available for download. This minor release fixes a number of bugs, perhaps most notably the non-functional concept caching. It also introduces automatic refresh of pages after their semantic data is stored. See Installation 1.5.6 for installation details. Further information can be found on the SMW 1.5.6 page.Semantic MediaWiki at Deutschlandradio Kultur
Jan 17 2011. A radio interview with Markus Krötzsch on Semantic MediaWiki has been aired on national German radio Deutschlandradio Kultur on Saturday Jan 15. In the interview, Markus explains the basic concepts of SMW, and the potential use of this technology for Wikipedia. A record of the interview (in German) can be found online at http://breitband.dradio.de/wikipedia-2-0/.Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.5 released
Jan 12 2011. Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.5 has been released and is now available for download. This minor release brings several new RDF export capabilities and improves the existing ones, and addresses a number of bugs. See Installation 1.5.5 for installation details. Further information can be found on the SMW 1.5.5 page.Zeit.de on Semantic MediaWiki
Jan 10 2011. Zeit.de on Semantic MediaWiki. The online edition of the German weekly magazine Zeit has published a number of articles regarding the upcoming 10 year anniversary of Wikipedia. One of the articles is about the possibility of a Semantic Wikipedia. The article gives a very readable, non-technical introduction to the topic. Go to article (de)
Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.4 released
Dec 01 2010. Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.4 has been released and is now available for download. This minor release mainly contains bug fixes and improves stability. See Installation 1.5.4 for installation details. Further information can be found on the SMW 1.5.4 page.Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.3 released
Nov 04 2010. Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.3 has been released and is now available for download. This minor release adds new explicit strict and non-strict comparators and fixes a number of issues, most notably support for the upcoming MediaWiki 1.17. It also addresses some security concerns, making it important to upgrade. See Installation 1.5.3 for installation details. Further information can be found on the SMW 1.5.3 page.Ontoprise hiring a Usability Engineer for SMW development
Nov 3 2010. ontoprise is hiring a Usability Engineer for SMW development. ontoprise, a leading provider of semantic solutions and a major player in SMW development, is hiring a usability engineer for their flagship SMW+ product. Based in Karlsruhe, Germany, the usability engineer aims at maximizing the user experience by conducting a professional usability engineering process. Read moreSemantic MediaWiki got a new look
Oct 31 2010. The SMW Project has launched its redesigned homepage and logo. The new homepage has a more functional structure and more direct links to relevant sections, while hopefully not being too overwhelming. The new logo provides a expressive, recognisable, and friendly face to the project. Downloadable versions of the logo can soon be found on the page SMW logo. The frame, colour scheme, and font will also be used to create a more unified appearance for logos of SMW extensions.Read moreSemantic MediaWiki 1.5.2 released
Aug 30 2010. The new version of SMW, Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.2, has now been released. This new minor version of SMW brings new autocompletion functionality for Special:Ask and various bug fixes that have been implemented since the previous release. See Installation 1.5.2 for installation details. Further information is found on the SMW 1.5.2 page.SMW in MIT Technology Review
July 8 2010. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reports about the use of semantic technologies for improving Wikimedia projects (e. g. Wikipedia), and in particular about the potential usage of Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) in this context. Read the full story online.Spam attack on semantic-mediawiki.org
July 2 2010. The site has been subject to various waves of spam attacks during the previous days. Clearly, the captcha that is currently used to prevent this is too weak. As an emergency measure, we have temporarily disabled editing for users who are not contributors or administrators (please send an email to Markus to obtain such a privilege). It is planned to upgrade the captcha soon so that editing can be opened again.Short online survey about Semantic Annotations
June 24 2010. Semantic Need is an upcoming extension which helps to improve semantic annotations in SMW. To get feedback on its development, Hans-Jörg from FZI set up a short online survey (taking around 15 minutes time) which he would kindly ask you to fill out. The survey is mainly targeting people working with SMW on a regular basis. In the survey, you will also learn some details and see some screenshots about the approach.
The URL for participating in the survey is http://amazonas.fzi.de/limesurvey/index.php?sid=86413&lang=en
Answers submitted until 2010-07-12 will be part of the final analysis. However, we will carry out an intermediate analysis on 2010-06-26 and thus kindly ask you to participate before this date already. Survey results will later be announced on this site.
Update on September 19 2010: Thanks to everyone participating! Initial results were presented at SMWCon Fall 2010 (Slides). More detailed report/analysis will follow.
Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.1 released
May 31 2010. The new version of SMW, Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.1, has now been released. This new minor version of SMW brings new features for inline queries and OWL/RDF export but mostly improves code quality and stability. Some SMW extensions may not yet be compatible with the new version, but it is always possible to downgrade back to SMW 1.5.0 if problems occur. See Installation 1.5.1 for installation details. Further information is found on the SMW 1.5.1 page.SMWCon Fall 2010 in Amsterdam
May 5, 2010. SMWCon Fall 2010, or the Fall 2010 meeting of the Semantic MediaWiki Conference, will be held on the weekend of Sept 18-19 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The event will bring together developers, users and corporations from the SMW community around the world. The event will feature tutorials, presentations and developer discussions.
The venue is
- Open Universiteit
- Studiecentrum Amsterdam
- Amstelveenseweg 390
- 1076 CT Amsterdam
- http://www.ou.nl
The Open University building is very close to public transport, the highway and Schiphol. Also hotels are available in the neighborhood. The capacity is 100 people. The registration fee is €30.
For more information, and to sign up, see the: SMWCon Fall 2010 conference page.
Next steps in Halo development: overview and discussion
March 24, 2010. Ontoprise is soliciting user feedback for the future development of the SMW+ and Halo extensions. SMW users are asked for comments and feedback to actively influence the next steps in the development of these tools. To view the list of scheduled projects and to add your own comments, please see the Halo planning page.SMWCon Spring 2010 in Boston
March 19, 2010. SMWCon Spring 2010, or the Spring meeting of the twice-annual Semantic MediaWiki Conference, will be held on the weekend of May 22-23 in Boston, or, more accurately, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. The event will bring together developers, users and corporations from the SMW community around the world. The event will feature tutorials, presentations and developer discussions. This will be the first event known as "SMWCon": previous such events have been called, most recently, "SMW Camp". The registration fee is $20. For more information, and to sign up, see here: SMWCon Spring 2010.Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.0 released: inverse properties, printout parameters, improved code
Mar 7 2010. The new version of SMW, Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.0, has now been released. In this new major version, SMW has again seen a significant number of internal changes for better extendibility and less bugs. Notable new features are inverse properties, new query parameters to control printout appearance, additional and improved datatypes, and an extended interface for Special:Ask. The new version also fixes a number of bugs and establishes full compatibility with recent MediaWiki versions, including the new vector skin. Upgrading from earlier versions of SMW is easy but needs some additional steps in certain cases, see Installation 1.5.0 for details. Further information is found on the SMW 1.5.0 page.SMW Homepage Open for Editing
December 29, 2009. As of today, the SMW homepage is open for public contributions. Up to now, editing on the site had been restricted to a manually approved user group so as to prevent the problems in documentation maintenance that the project experienced with the former, publicly editable version of its documentation. In the new setup, editing and account creation is open to everybody, and only a small set of core documentation pages (especially the Help namespace) is restricted to a user group of contributors. Earlier contributors are already in this new group, while new users can ask for contributor permissions by sending an email to Markus Krötzsch.Call for participation in GSoC 2010
December 2, 2009. It's never too early! A signup page has already been created for Wikimedia's participation in the Google Summer of Code 2010. For the Google Summer of Code 2009, one of Wikimedia's four projects was Semantic MediaWiki-based: the very successful project that created the Semantic Maps extension. Both students who are interested in working with Semantic MediaWiki, and developers who are willing to mentor students (it's a very rewarding process) are encouraged to sign up. Also, if you have an idea for an SMW-based extension or feature that would be appropriate for a summer-long, self-contained project, feel free to add it to the page as well, under "Project ideas".SMW Camp 2009 in Karlsruhe
October 12, 2009. Semantic MediaWiki Camp 2009 was held on the weekend of November 7-8 in Karlsruhe, Germany. The event, known as "SMW Camp", brought together developers, users and corporations from the SMW community around the world. It featured tutorials, as well as developer discussions, on Saturday; and an "unconference"-style set of presentations and discussions on Sunday. The registration fee was 15 euros. For more information, see here: http://smwforum.ontoprise.com/smwforum/index.php/SMW_Camp_09PDF Version of SMW Manual Available
Aug 16 2009. A PDF version of the Semantic MediaWiki manual [PDF; 1,28 MB] for SMW 1.4.3 is now available. The document is based on the user manual and other manuals on this website which have been compiled and formatted for your convenience by ontoprise GmbH. Please consider the environment before you actually print those 77 pages.Semantic MediaWiki 1.4.3 released: tracking input errors, new query options, less bugs
Aug 5 2009. With Semantic MediaWiki 1.4.3, the SMW Project provides the third update for SMW 1.4. The new version brings a number of feature extensions. Most notably, SMW now keeps track of errors that occur when unsuitable values are assigned to some property, and various options were added for formatting results of inline queries, including a new results format, "category". Moreover, a significant number of open issues and bugs have been closed, and compatibility with MediaWiki 1.5 has been ensured. A related update of Semantic Result Formats is going to appear soon. Upgrading from earlier versions of SMW is easy, see Installation 1.4.3 for details. Further information is found on the SMW 1.4.3 page.Security Alert for SRF Ploticus
May 5 2009. The SMW extension Semantic Result Formats (SRF) contains a result format ploticus as an optional feature. Ploticus is disabled by default but can be enabled in LocallSettings.php. Enabling the ploticus format is not safe and introduces critical security vulnerabilities. All sites using ploticus are strongly advised to disable the feature immediately. The maintainer of SRF has been informed, and the ploticus result format will be disabled in SRF until a fix for this problem is available.Semantic MediaWiki at CeBit 2009
Feb 18 2009. Semantic MediaWiki will be present at the CeBit, the world's largest IT fair, in Hannover, Germany, March 3-8 2009. At the KIT Karlsruhe Institute of Technology stand (C02 in Hall 9). We will be presenting demos of the software, and offer the possibility to chat about cooperations and future development. We would be very happy to meet you there.Semantic MediaWiki 1.4.2 released: Better performance, PostgreSQL support, JSON export
Feb 11 2009. With Semantic MediaWiki 1.4.2, the SMW Project provides the second update for SMW 1.4. The new version includes a number of changes such as significant performance improvements, initial PostgreSQL support, and a new JSON data export. Also, the query formats vCard and iCalendar have been moved to Semantic Result Formats 1.4.2, so it is wise to update both extensions at the same time. Other than this, upgrade is very easy, see Installation 1.4.2 for details. Further information is found on the SMW 1.4.2 page.New data visualization for SMW: Exhibit and Ploticus
22 Jan 2009. Semantic Result Formats (SRF), the add-on package for query formats in SMW, has just been extended with two great additions for powerful data visualisation: Ploticus and Exhibit. Both are available to first testers from SVN. Read more
