[[Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.6]] Install instructions for the latest SMW version are also online in a more convenient format for reading: http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Installation Contents * Disclaimer * Requirements * Installation ** Testing your Installation ** Customising Semantic MediaWiki ** Running SMW on older versions of MediaWiki * Upgrading existing installations ** Upgrading geographic coordinates ** Upgrading n-ary (multivalued) properties ** Changed configuration options * Troubleshooting * SMW is installed. What should I do now? * Contact == Disclaimer == For a proper legal disclaimer, see the file "COPYING". 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. == Requirements == * MediaWiki 1.15.4 or greater (tested on 1.16.0 to 1.17alpha (r63248). * PHP 5.* or greater installed and working * MySQL >= 4.0.14 (version required by MediaWiki) OR PostgreSQL >= 8.3 Note that Postgres support is still preliminary and might require special setup, see http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/PostgreSQL Notes: * SMW uses the PHP mb_*() multibyte functions such as mb_strpos in the php_mbstring.dll extension. This is standard but not enabled by default on some distributions of PHP. See http://php.net/manual/en/ref.mbstring.php#mbstring.installation * For installation and upgrade, SMW needs the rights to create new tables (CREATE) and to alter tables (ALTER TABLE). Both can be removed again after SMW was set up. The script SMW_setup.php can use the DB credentials from AdminSettings.php for this purpose, avoiding the need of extra rights for the wiki DB user. * SMW creates and alters temporary tables for certain semantic queries. To do this, your wikidb user must have privileges for CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES. The according features can be disabled by adding the following to Localsettings.php: $smwgQSubcategoryDepth=0; $smwgQPropertyDepth=0; $smwgQFeatures = SMW_ANY_QUERY & ~SMW_DISJUNCTION_QUERY; $smwgQConceptFeatures = SMW_ANY_QUERY & ~SMW_DISJUNCTION_QUERY & ~SMW_CONCEPT_QUERY; == Installation == If you upgrade an existing installation of Semantic MediaWiki, also read the remarks in the section "Notes on Upgrading" below! (1) Extract the archive or check out the current files from SVN to obtain the directory "SemanticMediaWiki" that contains all relevant files. Copy this directory to "[wikipath]/extensions/" (or extract/download it there). We abbreviate "[wikipath]/extensions/SemanticMediaWiki" as "[SMW_path]". (2) Insert the following two lines into "[wikipath]/LocalSettings.php": include_once("$IP/extensions/SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticMediaWiki.php"); enableSemantics('example.org'); where example.org should be replaced by your server's name (or IP address). The latter is needed only once, using the "preferred" name of your server. It is no problem to access a site by more than one servername in any case. If you have custom namespaces (such as "Portal"), read the note below. (3) In your wiki, log in as a user with admin status and go to the page "Special:SMWAdmin" to do the final setup steps. Two steps are needed: at first, trigger the database setup ("Database installation and upgrade"). Afterwards, activate the automatic data update ("Data repair and upgrade"). Note that the first step requires permissions to alter/create database tables, as explained in the above note. The second step takes some time; go to Special:SMWAdmin to follow its progress. SMW can be used before this completes, but will not have access to all data yet (e.g. page categories). Both of those actions can also be accomplished with the command-line PHP scripts SMW_setup.php and SMW_refreshData.php. Read the documentation in [SMW_path]/maintenance/README for details on how to run such scripts. '''Remark:''' Semantic MediaWiki uses ten additional namespace indexes (see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Using_custom_namespaces), in the range from 100 to 109. 100 and 101 are not used (they were used in early beta versions). 106 and 107 are reserved for the SemanticForms extension. If you have your own custom namespaces, you have to set the parameter $smwgNamespaceIndex before including SemanticMediaWiki.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. === 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. You should see Semantic MediaWiki (version nn) listed as a Parser Hook there. Create a regular wiki page named "TestSMW", and in it enter the wiki text Property test: [[testproperty::Dummypage]] When previewing the page before saving, you should see a Factbox at the bottom of the article that shows your input. After saving the page, click on the link "Browse properties" in the page's toolbox. This view should show Testproperty with value Dummypage. 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). === Customising Semantic MediaWiki === Semantic MediaWiki can be customised by a number of settings. The available options are detailed in http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Configuration === 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. == Upgrading existing installations == (Please read all of this before upgrading) Installations of SMW 1.5.* can be upgraded by just replacing the files, and all extensions compatible with SMW 1.5.1 should work without modification. If problems occur, it is possible to go back to 1.5.1 by simply using the old files, waiting with the upgrade until the relevant extensions provide updates. If not done already, it is suggested to change the inclusion of SMW in LocalSettings.php to the following as described in the installation instructions above: include_once("$IP/extensions/SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticMediaWiki.php"); Including SMW_Settings.php as in earlier versions will continue to work, but may be disabled in some future version. Existing SMW 1.4.* installations and all SMW installations that already use the default store (SMWSQLStore2) can basically follow the above installation steps. The latter covers all sites with SMW 1.2 to 1.3 that do not use a special setting to switch back to the old store ("SMWSQLStore" or "SMWRAPStore"). Older versions of SMW can be upgrade in a similar fashion, but must ensure that they do not depend on now peculiarities of the old version. Please read the upgrade instructions for SMW version 1.2 and 1.3 for details. Moreover, SMW 1.5.0 finally removed all backwards compatibility to SMW beta versions below SMW 1.0. If your wiki still uses the setting $smwgSMWBetaCompatible=true then you should not upgrade until you find that disabling this setting works properly and without complications. There are two changes in SMW functionality that may affect some sites that used earlier versions. Additional steps are required if the wiki uses n-ary (multivalued) properties or properties of type Geographic coordinate and the required upgrade steps are described in separate sections below. Directly after enabling SMW 1.5.1, it could potentially happen that the site shows SQL errors due to background jobs trying to access the new DB structure even before you initialised it. This can even block you from reaching SMWAdmin. In this case, either use the script SMW_setup.php from the command-line, or access your database and delete all entries in the table "job". After this, no errors should show up while accessing the special page for initialisation. When upgrading from SMW 1.4.* or older, extensions of SMW (e.g. Semantic Forms) need to be updated to a version that is compatible with SMW 1.5.1. See your extension's homepage for details. If used, it is also necessary to update to a more recent version of SemanticResultFormats (SRF). === Upgrading geographic coordinates === The datatype Geographic coordinate has been moved from SMW to the Semantic Maps extension. Wikis that use this type should install Semantic Maps version 0.6 or above. No other changes are needed, but it is recommended to install Semantic Maps before upgrading SMW so as to avoid problems at any time. The move has been done to concentrate geo-related features in one extension for better maintenance and ease of use. === Upgrading n-ary (multivalued) properties === The way how these properties are declared on their property pages has changed since SMW 1.4.3, and it is necessary to change the pages of all such properties to use them again as before. Until SMW 1.4.*, such properties were declared by type declarations as in the following example: [[has type::Page; Number; String]] In this case, a property with three fields of the specified types was declared. You can use the inline query {{#ask: [[has type::~ *;*]] }} to obtain a list of all properties in your wiki that are of this form at all. Since SMW 1.5.0, two property assignments must be made on the property page instead: [[has type::Record]] [[has fields::Page; Number; String]] In other words, all "n-ary" properties are now of the new datatype Record, and the information about their fields is stated independently. This change allowed for many improvements in SMW, and makes it possible to create new (better) extensions for supporting compound property values in the future. To upgrade, ''first'' install the new version of SMW, then use the above inline query to efficiently find all properties that need to be changed. After updating the pages as required, all values should be accessible as before (possibly some repair jobs need to finish before this is really the case; check your job queue). If you change the pages before the upgrade to SMW 1.5.1, then it will be necessary to start a repair cycle of SMW to ensure that all affected page are indeed updated. === Changed configuration options === Some configuration options (used in LocalSettings.php) have changed since SMW 1.0. All settings are documented in detail in the file SMW_Settings.php. The following list gives the version in which a setting was first introduced, so it can be ignored if you already run this version or a more recent one. * [1.4] Up to version 1.4, the default for value for the setting $smwgQComparators was '<|>|!'. It now has changed to '<|>|!|~' so the "like" comparator ~ is enabled by default. * [1.4] Version 1.4 still supported a setting $smwgSMWBetaCompatible to enable the old query syntax and the Relation namespace. This backwards compatibility has now been dropped and the setting is no longer used. Please update your wiki to not use the outdated (and now undocumented) features. * [1.3] Since SMW 1.3, the Factbox is hidden by default and will not appear. As a compensation, the toolbox (usually on the left below the search field) shows a link to Special:Browse. To use the display behaviour of the Factbox as it was before SMW 1.3, set $smwgShowFactbox = SMW_FACTBOX_NONEMPTY; The new link and the Factbox during editing can also be configured; see SMW_Settings.php for details. * [1.2.1] SMW will no longer support nested link syntax in property values by default, since this was known to cause problems. To re-enable this, set $smwgLinksInValues = true; * [1.2] The syntax and the Relation: namespace have still been officially supported in SMW 1.2, and were optionally available until SMW 1.4.*. Both are now disabled and can no longer be used. * [1.2] If you had a setting $smwgQDisjunctionSupport = false, then you now need the following settings: $smwgQFeatures = SMW_ANY_QUERY & ~SMW_DISJUNCTION_QUERY; $smwgQConceptFeatures = SMW_ANY_QUERY & ~SMW_DISJUNCTION_QUERY & ~SMW_CONCEPT_QUERY; Older configuration changes are found online, see http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Installation_1.3 == Troubleshooting == Some technical problems are well known and have easy fixes. Please view the online manual: http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Troubleshooting See http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Reporting_bugs for reporting and looking up bugs. You can also send an email to semediawiki-user@lists.sourceforge.net (subscribe first at http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=semediawiki-user) == SMW is installed. What should I do 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 few properties, and annotate many of the articles with the property. As with categories, less is often more in semantic annotation: do not use overly specific properties. A property that is not applicable to at least ten 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: ... }}) 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." If European cities are important for your wiki, you can create a Concept page for storing that particular query. 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, properties, and types using the Special pages for each. == Contact == See "Contact" in the file README, or view the current online information http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/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