Announcing Semantic Bundle - Wikitech-l

28 Jun 2009


      Hi,
Sergey Chernyshev and I are pleased to announce Semantic Bundle, a
recently-released package of MediaWiki extensions based around Semantic
MediaWiki. It's meant to simplify usage of Semantic MediaWiki, by bundling
it together with 15 other extensions that are commonly used in conjunction
with SMW, into one downloadable .zip or .tgz file. You can read more about
Semantic Bundle, and download it, here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_Bundle
To quote from that page, there are a number of benefits to Semantic Bundle:
- it provides a "best practices" set of extensions around Semantic
MediaWiki, based on user experiences
- it simplifies download, especially for those systems that don't have SVN,
and especially for those extensions (like ParserFunctions) that don't have a
downloadable version already
- it tries to guarantee working code by using tagged, stable versions of
extensions whenever possible
- it simplifies installation by providing a pre-generated list of includes
To amplify on the third point, the plan is to update the Semantic Bundle
downloadables whenever a tag is incremented on one of the tagged extensions
that it uses. If you didn't know about tags, they've been supported for a
while on the MediaWiki SVN repository, although not that many extensions use
them yet. You can see their location here:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/tags/extensions/
We also encourage anyone who maintains an extension to create a tag for
their extensions, in order to create "stable" versions.
Also, we hope that Semantic Bundle will serve as a model for other extension
"bundles" in the future. As the number of MediaWiki extensions continues to
grow, it becomes harder for administrators to research, download and install
every extension that might be useful to them; bundles help to streamline
that process. It should be noted that Semantic Bundle is not the first
bundle of extensions to be released, and not even the first SMW-based one;
that would be the "SMW+" package, created by Ontoprise. That one is
different, though, in that it includes MediaWiki itself, and in fact at the
moment it's a modified, patched version of MW, which makes SMW+ somewhat
more of an application in itself. So Semantic Bundle may be the first "pure"
package of extensions.
-Yaron Koren