Hi everyone,
as one of the students working for MediaWiki under Google Summer of Code
2011, let me thank you for answering my odd questions, and bringing insight
in areas I might have overlooked.
Through the last three months, guided by my mentor Markus Krötzsch, and the
people at Semantic MediaWiki (especially Jeroen De Dauw), I've been trying
to build a newer way of constructing queries.
As part of that initiative, we've built an interface called QueryCreator,
which improves on it's predecessor, Special:Ask. QC's makes many tiny
improvements over Special:Ask, but mainly requires you to know less about
the query syntax. Some of the bigger improvements are:
1) A less cluttered interface
2) Auto-complete for properties and categories using the MW API.
3) An interesting javascript based Print-out builder, with associated modal
windows.
We have not completely eliminated the use the SMW query syntax in the
interface(that could be a good goal for the future), but we believe a new
user without any prior experience of SMW should be able to query your SMW
wiki, without poring over the help-files. We hope to put QueryCreator in the
upcoming release of SMW.
The other (but related) work we've done is to try and look for those
functionalities which need to be repeatedly implemented by a programmer
while making other Query interfaces. We know that a single query interface
may not always be suited to all kinds of users, nor to the many different
domains where SMW is implemented. So we've done some work building two
classes called QueryUI and QueryUIHelper, which encapsulate much of the core
behaviour as well as some commonly used interface elements, so that it may
be easier for you (developers) to build a query interface in the future.
You can have a look at my commits on the work at
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/author/devayon
If you have any comments about this work, please let me know. I have plans
to improve upon my work from these last few months, and look forward to your
insights.
On a related note, a big thank you to Sumana at Wikimedia Foundation for
making it so easy for all the GSoC 2011 participants (there were 8 of us in
the beginning) to contribute.
It's been a fun experience, and I hope to keep contributing code to SMW in
the future.
Cheers,
Devayon