User:Skierpage/SMW work

More on my Semantic MediaWiki work

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I learned PHP to contribute to the Semantic MediaWiki extension. It's all sitting in Subversion. Unfortunately, it seems every site has disabled ViewVC's "query view" due to XSS bugs, so I can't find an easy way to query author=skierpage for my contributions.

Quick summary:

Custom units and display units

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SMW lets you annotate wiki pages with attributes; each attribute is a property and its value. For example the w:General Motors EV1 article could say

 The car had a [[has engine power::102 kW]] electric motor.

The value for power is a number, but there are many different units for power. In discussion with Markus Krötzsch I enhanced SMW so you could create a new datatype [[Type:Power]] and on its page give the conversion formula as additional special properties.

 [[Corresponds to::1 W, Watt, Watts]]
 [[Corresponds to::0.001 kW]]
 [[Corresponds to::0.0013410220 hp,bhp,horsepower]]
 ...

This lets you annotate numeric values for a quantity in multiple units while storing them in a consistent unit.

For the property "has engine power" you probably want to display this value in horsepower and kW, not Watts or calories. I added another special property "display units" that indicate what units a property should use, thus [[display units::bhp, kW]]

Help:custom units documents what I implemented. The talented SMW team generalized it to a Quantity type, but the concept remains in SMW 1.7, see http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Property:Height

Allowed values

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A project wiki will probably use a "Status" property, so you could e.g. query for all projects with [[status:in testing]]. To discourage dirty data — status "in test", "testing", etc. — I added a general feature that lets you enumerate the possible values of a property using the special property "allows value". See it in use on olpc:Property:Status.

Documentation

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I wrote and rewrote a lot of the SMW 1.0 documentation and examples to explain these and other features, see all my contributions. For example, Many-valued properties is a help page I wrote from scratch (I started it on another semantic wiki)