Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The big development news around Semantic MediaWiki this summer came at the 2008 Wikimania conference in Alexandria, Egypt.

What is Semantic MediaWiki? It is GPL-licensed software that is an extension to MediaWiki — the software that runs Wikipedia – which allows for the encoding of semantic data within wiki pages; it provides a basis for managing large amounts of data in MediaWiki, supporting wiki-based data creation, semantic search, and data export.

Ontoprise GmbH, the developer of an extension to Semantic MediaWiki called the HALO-Extension — which is being used in conjunction with Vulcan Inc.’s Project Halo for acquiring scientific knowledge — and the open source SMW (Semantic MediaWiki) Project agreed to co-operate closely on the further development and dissemination of Semantic MediaWiki and Ontoprise’s distribution for commercial users, Semantic MediaWiki+.

According to a press release from Ontoprise, “This group action includes planning of a joint roadmap, synchronized releases, and concerted quality assurance on releases. The teams accord to publish the following free software releases:

Semantic MediaWiki as a powerful basis for managing large amounts of structured data in MediaWiki, supporting wiki-based data creation, semantic search and data export; and

HALO-Extension to Semantic MediaWiki for enhanced wiki navigation, improved knowledge authoring, simplified knowledge retrieval, and efficient improvement of the quality of the authored knowledge.”

Why is it important to have a joint roadmap, synchronized releases and concerted quality assurance, particularly for enterprise customers?

“We are facing an increasing demand of companies planning to deploy Semantic MediaWiki; they are perceiving SMW’s capabilities to blend text and machine-processable data as an attractive alternative to other, non-semantic Wikis,” writes Daniel Hansch in an e-mail.

Hansch is certified senior project manager at Germany-based Ontoprise GmbH, where he leads a consortium to develop the extension to the Semantic MediaWiki for the Halo project. “We at AIFB [the Institut für Angewandte Informatik und Formale Beschreibungsverfahren at the University of Karlsruhe, which funds SemanticMediaWiki development] and Ontoprise are really happy about this!”

As the market should be, as it clears up some persistent confusion. Hansch says that, when talking with customers for the first time, it’s often difficult to explain that SMW is rather a universe of more or less independently produced open-source software components than an integrated whole. Similarly, Markus Krötzsch and Denny Vrandecic at AIFB, who develop and maintain SMW together with a core team of project members, also have observed a confusion among their contacts regarding the relationship of the Halo-extension and Ontoprise’s off-the-shelf distribution, SMW+, and Semantic MediaWiki.

“This caused customers to go on hold with their Wiki-project or, which is worse, to go with a Wiki-product which is perceived [as] more coherent and easy to obtain [but] paying the price of ending up with unstructured and un-queryable collections of wiki-pages,” Hansch notes.

“Denny, Markus, and myself agreed that a tight co-operation of both teams bears the chance to boost the entire project by combining our forces and by generating a coherent story of Semantic MediaWiki and SMW+. This makes our customer’s lives far easier! We believe that the market will acknowledge that this ground-breaking semantic software is now collaboratively fostered by the main drivers of the SMW project.”

Hansch writes that both teams are attacking mainly on two fronts: a) prepare SMW to become part of semantic Wikipedia and b) seamlessly embed SMW into the typical IT landscape of enterprises.

“Harnessing Wikipedia with semantic capabilities requires primarily a simple, clean, scalable and minimally intrusive SMW-core. The complementary goal of allowing enterprise-wide deployments of Semantic MediaWiki embraces tasks to ensure data-security (e.g. access control on data), providing interfaces to standard enterprise software (e.g. Microsoft Office products) and lowering the entry barriers for non-expert users (e.g. including WYSIWYG-editors),” he notes. “There are a lot of new features coming up — and we will see many of these features in the next synchronized release in mid-November.”

He says that marketing efforts will reflect the new collaboration by aligning their presences on fairs and conferences; Ontoprise will raise its profile as a leading provider of commercial and commercial-like deployments of SMW+, and Krötzsch and Vrandecic will act as maintainers and developers of Semantic MediaWiki.

“Strategically, we are generating synergies by identifying a common roadmap and assigning technical work to the teams according to their expertise,” he writes. “This will dramatically accelerate the development of Semantic MediaWiki and SMW+. In addition, both teams are able now to anticipate changes to the code-base early enough; users of SMW will benefit from that, since SMW, Halo-Extension and SMW+ will be released jointly at one date, thus, minimizing down-times for installations.

“We all believe that the co-operation of both teams is a necessary step to outpace, at least, non-semantic wikis.”

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