[[Semantic MediaWiki 1.4.2]] 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 ** 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 1.11.* or greater (tested from 1.11.0 to 1.15alpha (r47833)). * PHP 5.x 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/includes/SMW_Settings.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. 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://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Custom_namespaces), in the range from 100 to 109. 100 and 101 are only needed if $smwgSMWBetaCompatible is set. 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 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. === 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 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) Existing SMW 1.4.1 installations and all SMW installations that already use the default store (SMWSQLStore2) can simply 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"). In these cases the new data upgrade feature will ensure that your data is refreshed to the new version. To speed up the update, use MediaWiki's script runJobs.php. Older SMW versions or SMW versions that use the old store can upgrade in the same fashion, but first need to remove any setting that configures SMW to use the old store. Again, all data will immediately be available when the data upgrade has finished. Directly after enabling SMW 1.4.2, it can potentially happen that the site shows SQL errors due to background jobs trying to access the new DB structure even before you intialised 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. Especially when upgrading from SMW 1.3 or older, extensions of SMW (e.g. Semantic Forms) need to be updated to a version that is compatible with SMW 1.4.2. See your extension's homepage for details. If you use one of the formats timeline (or eventline), icalendar, or vcard in inline queries, then you need to install/upgrade the extension SemanticResultFormats (SRF) in version 1.4.2 or greater. The formats have been migrated to this extension package and are enabled there by default after installation. === 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. * [1.3] 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] If your wiki uses syntax or the Relation: namespace, you may want to set $smwgSMWBetaCompatible = true; before the line including SMW_Settings.php in LocalSettings.php. Consider changing to #ask to be able to drop SMW beta compatibility. * [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