From: Markus K. <ma...@se...> - 2008-09-08 17:07:48
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Hi all, SMW 1.3 is out and it is time to make plans for the next major release. Our intention is to release SMW 1.4 at Nov 17 2008, with a possible release candidate as early as Oct 25. Of course, minor updates for 1.3 might appear in between as needed for fixing bugs. Currently, we intend to look at the following topics for SMW 1.4: * SMW-Parsing process. Various problems with SMW relate to the way in which we pass around data during runs of MediaWiki. We would like to re-write this to have a more stable behaviour throughout. * Improved Type:Date, with support for a broader range of dates and internationalised inputs. * Support for sub-concept relationships (just like sub-category relationships) and for the use of concepts in concepts -- if I can get it working. I do not promiss inverses here yet, but I might have another look at their implementation too. * Make SMW more extendable with new "special properties", so that extension providers can bring their own pre-defined properties. This might be the required step to get DPL features into SMW, and we will also look at this. * Cleaner and (if possible) shorter core code. Our new extension package SemanticResultFormats will be used as the new home for some of the more complex SMW output formats, such as Timeline (of course there will be a synchronised release of this extension to ensure seamless upgrading). * Alternative input methods. We already presented some first prototypes of new input methods #set and #declare. We will further look into improving those. This is a tentative list that may be modified as we go forward. I will send a separate mails to the developers' list regarding any internal changes this entails. We expect major internal changes that require updates in extensions, so upgrading SMW from SVN might be somewhat dangerous within the next two months. I will send this warning again before I start major changes. Finally, there are some tasks I know we cannot address, but which we would like to support if someone steps forward to take the lead: * PostgreSQL support for SMW. We know that it does not work right now, but it is surely doable if someone using Postgres comes along to help. * A better SMW installation/upgrade interface. We would like to have something like MediaWiki's config (the thing you call for setup) for SMW too. In particular, this should be able to act as a web-interface to some of the core maintenance functions. This could be viewed as a re-implementation of Special:SMWAdmin. * Help in internationalising parts of SMW that are not messages. We still use special files for keeping the names of, e.g., datatypes. It would be great if someone could pursue what better options there might be. Maybe files like we use them can be integrated with BetaWiki (our wonderful translation community), or maybe we can establish a "fake extension" for translating those, and importing the translations into SMW-format with some script. Creative ideas are wanted. There are many other ideas that one could realise in SMW extensions. If you still feel that some relevant feature request to the SMW *core* is not mentioned here at all (I may have forgotten it), then please feel free to say so. I did not see any other major requests in Bugzilla. Cheers, Markus -- Markus Krötzsch Semantic MediaWiki http://semantic-mediawiki.org http://korrekt.org ma...@se... |