[Mediawiki-l] Semantic MediaWiki 1.6 released

[Jeroen De Dauw]

Hey all,

I'm very happy to announce the release of Semantic MediaWiki 1.6.

This release has been in the making over the past four months and includes
contributions by many people. It brings significant improvements to SMWs
architecture and introduces many new features. The most important changes
are listed below:

* Full support added for storing SMW data directly within an RDF
triplestore, and for answering #ask queries based on this data.
* The Type namespace has been abolished. Builtin types now are displayed by
the special page Special:Types, and there are no "custom types" any longer.
* Changed the way in which units of measurement work. Type:Number now does
not accept any units, and a new type "Quantity" is used for numbers with
units.
* The declaration of Type:Record properties has changed. Instead of a list
of datatypes, the declaration now requires a list of properties that are to
be used for the fields of the record.
* Introduced pre-defined builtin properties for every datatype.
* Changed the way parameters in query printers are specified and handled
using the Validator extension.
* Added UNIX-style DSV (Delimiter-separated values) result format.
* Reworked internal data model.
* Fixed PostgreSQL issues with the installation and upgrade code.
* Added #smwdoc parser hook that displays a table with parameter
documentation for a single specified result format.
* Fixed escaping issues in the JSON result format.

For a more comprehensive list of these changes, see the release notes [0]
and blog post I made about this release [1]. As usual, you can also consult
the SMW 1.6 page on the SMW wiki [2] and the installation and upgrade
instructions [3].

To keep up to date with SMW developments, you can follow the SMW Twitter [4]
or Indenti.ca [5].

[0]
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/tags/extensions/SemanticMediaWiki/REL_1_6/RELEASE-NOTES?view=co
[1] http://blog.bn2vs.com/2011/07/30/semantic-mediawiki-1-6-released/
[2] http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki_1.6
[3] http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Installation_1.6
[4] https://twitter.com/#!/SemanticWiki
[5] https://identi.ca/smw

Cheers

--
Jeroen De Dauw
http://www.bn2vs.com
Don't panic. Don't be evil.
--