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Semantic MediaWiki 0.7

Contents:

Disclaimer
Requirements
Installation
Notes on Upgrading
FAQ
Contact

Disclaimer

Semantic MediaWiki can be used for production wikis, but please note that the software is still under development. In general, the extension can be installed into a working wiki without making any irreversible changes to the source code or database, so you can try out the software without much risk (though no dedicated uninstall mechanism is provided). Every serious wiki should be subject to regular database backups. If you have any specific questions, please contact the authors.

For a proper legal disclaimer, see the file "COPYING".

Requirements

- MediaWiki 1.9.* or 1.10 (versions >=1.7 might still work) - PHP 5.x or greater installed and working - MySQL >= 4.0.14 (required by MediaWiki)

Installation

If you upgrade an existing installation of Semantic MediaWiki, also read the remarks in the section "Notes on Upgrading" below!

(1) Extract the archive or check out the current files from SVN to obtain the

   directory "SemanticMediaWiki" that contains all relevant files. Copy this
   directory to "[wikipath]/extensions/" (or extract/download it to this place).
   We abbreviate "[wikipath]/extensions/SemanticMediaWiki" as "[SMW_path]" below.

(2) If you use MediaWiki 1.9 or smaller, you *must* manually change the file

   "[wikipath]/includes/Parser.php". Open the file in some text editor and find
   the first line "$text = $this->replaceVariables( $text, $args );" located
   around line 1000 in the function "internalParse". Right after this line, insert 
   the new line:

     wfRunHooks( 'InternalParseBeforeLinks', array( &$this, &$text ) );

   Users of MediaWiki 1.10 or greater do not have to do this.

(3) Insert the following lines into the file "[wikipath]/LocalSettings.php":

    include_once('extensions/SemanticMediaWiki/includes/SMW_Settings.php');
    enableSemantics('example.org');
   where example.org should be replaced by your server's name (or IP address).
   If you have custom namespaces (e.g. "Portal"), read the note below.

(4) In your wiki, log in as a user with admin status and go to the page

   "Special:SMWAdmin" to do the final setup steps.

Remark: Semantic MediaWiki uses six additional custom namespaces (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Custom_namespaces). If you have your own custom namespaces, you have to set the parameter $smwgNamespaceIndex before including SMW_Settings.php. See the documentation within SMW_Settings.php for details. If you add more namespaces later on, then you have to assign them to higher numbers than those used by Semantic MediaWiki.

Customising Semantic MediaWiki

Semantic MediaWiki can be customised by a number of settings. To do so, you can set respective parameters somewhere below the line "include_once('extensions/SemanticMediaWiki/includes/SMW_Settings.php');" in your LocalSetting.php. For example, one can write

include_once('extensions/SemanticMediaWiki/includes/SMW_Settings.php');
$smwgIQDefaultLinking = 'all';
enableSemantics('example.org');

to enable links on all results returned by inline queries. The parameters that are available are documented in the files SMW_Settings.php (general) and SMW_InlineQueries.php (related to queries).

Running SMW on older versions of MediaWiki

If your site is still running on PHP4, SMW is not supported. It would hardly be possible to backport the code to the old PHP version. If you have PHP5 but an older MediaWiki version, additional patches/modifications might be needed. Download an older release of SMW and have a look at the included INSTALL instructions to find out whether other changes are recommended therein.

Notes on Upgrading

The below instructions describe how to upgrade from one minor version to the next, e.g. from 0.2 (or 0.2b) to 0.3. If you missed one of the updates (e.g. if you want to jump from 0.1 to 0.3) then it is wise to proceed stepwise: install all intermediate versions subsequently and follow the given update instructions. For example, first upgrade from 0.1 to 0.2 before upgrading further from 0.2 to 0.3. Also, do not forget to backup your database before any upgrade.

Upgrading from version 0.6 or 0.5

Go to Special:SMWAdmin and press the setup button there. From any patch in MediaWiki is now obsolete (but your changes should have vanished when MediaWiki 1.10 anyway).

The file SMW_LocalSettings.php is now obsolete. Modify your LocalSettings.php as described above, and import your changes in SMW_LocalSettings.php, if any, into LocalSettings.php as well.

Upgrading from 0.4.x:

Upgrading does not require any special changes. However, you have to upgrade MediaWiki and SMW. This should not be a problem, and in fact you need one patch less.

The type "Geographic area" and "Geographic length" are no longer built in. But you can easily create them by yourself with the new type customisation features. See the docu at ontoworld.org for details.

Testing your Installation

If you are uncertain that everything went well, you can do some testing steps to check if SMW is set up properly.

Go to the Special:Version page and you should see Semantic MediaWiki (version nn) listed as a Parser Hook and several wfSMWXxxx functions listed as Extension Functions.

Create a regular wiki page named "TestSMW", and in it enter the wiki text

 Relation test:  testrelation::Dummypage
 Attribute test: testattribute:=dummyvalue

when you preview and save the page, the SMW "Factbox" should appear showing the relation Testrelation to Dummypage and the attribute Testattribute with a warning (since you haven't given it a type).

If you don't get these results, check the steps in the Installation section, consult the FAQ section, then contact the user support list (see the Contact section).

FAQ

- Problem: I installed Semantic MediaWiki and all went fine. What should I do

 with it now?

 Semantic MediaWiki is there to help you to structure your data, so that you
 can browse and search it easier. Typically, you should first add semantic 
 markup to articles that cover a topic that is typical for your wiki. A single
 article, semantic or not, will not improve your search capabilities.

 Start with a kind of article that occurs often in your wiki, possibly with
 some type of articles that is already collected in some category, such as
 cities, persons, or software projects. For these articles, introduce a small
 amount of relations and attributes, and annotate many of the articles in
 this way. As with categories, less is often more in semantic annotation: do
 not use overly specific relations or attributes. A relation that is not
 applicable in at least ten or twenty articles is hardly useful.

 Templates can greatly simplify initial annotation. Create a flashy template
 for your users to play with, and hide the semantic annotations in the code
 of the template. Use the ParserFunctions extension to implement optional
 parameters, so that your users can leave fields in the template unspecified
 without creating faulty annotations.

 Develop suitable inline queries (<ask> ... </ask>) along with any new
 annotation. If you don't know how to use some annotation for searching, or
 if you are not interested in searching for the annotated information anyway,
 then you should probably not take the effort in the first place. Annotate
 in a goal-directed way! Not all information can be extracted from the
 annotations in your wiki. E.g. one can currently not search for articles that
 are *not* in a given category. Think about what you want to ask for before
 editing half of your wiki with new semantics ...

 If in doubt, choose simple annotations and learn to combine them into more
 complex information. For example, you do not need to have a category for
 "European cities" -- just combine "located in::Europe" and "Category:City."
 In any case, if some annotation is not sufficient, you can still add more
 information. Cleaning too specific and possibly contradictory annotations
 can be more problematic.

 Regularly review users' use of categories, relations, attributes, and types
 using the Special pages for each.

- Problem: Previewing or storing articles with semantic relations causes

 database errors.

 Your database was not initialized properly. Go to Special:SMWAdmin for
 instructions.

- Problem: When using annotations like located in::Europe, the semantic

 data is not extracted, and a link to an article called "located in::Europe"
 appears.

 You probably use a version of MediaWiki that is smaller or equal to 1.9.*
 and you did not make the required changes in Parser.php as described above.

- Problem: After installing SMW, some or all pages are not displayed at all. - Problem: In some cases, pages are displayed incompletely, with some parts

 vanishing.

 This is due to the restrictive memory default settings on some sites, and
 is not directly caused by SMW (any additional extension code might cause this).
 Uncomment the line "ini_set( 'memory_limit', '20M' );" in LocalSettings.php
 and possibly adjust the value to your needs.

- Problem: I have a problem that is not in this list.

 Report general bugs at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/
 where you can also find out whether your problem is known.
 You can also send an email to semediawiki-user@lists.sourceforge.net.

Contact

If you have remarks or questions, please send them to

semediawiki-user@lists.sourceforge.net

You can join this mailing list at http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=147937

Please report bugs to MediaZilla, http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org

Technical support questions or feature requests that are mailed directly to the developers will usually not be answered. Please use the mailing list.

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