Samuel's Tech Blog

From today evening, I'm taking one week off from work to make a sprint to try to finalize the RDFIO extension, for RDF import and export in Semantic MediaWiki.

This will be a required step for finalizing the vision described in my SMWCon fall 2011 talk, the other month.

I developed RDFIO as part of Google Summer of Code 2010, and it got into a working proof-of-concept state. Some issues, such as with performance, never were resolved though. Also it depended upon two other modules, which, after Semantic MediaWiki changed a lot of it's internals in version 1.6, have still not been updated to support these, leaving RDFIO in a state where it does not support SMW 1.6.

So, a little sprint is definitely needed, to get RDFIO in working condition again. At the same time I hope to look at it with fresh eyes, after having a lot more coding experience now, than when I coded RDFIO, after one year of quite some Java and Python development in my work at UPPMAX.

Things I plan to have a look at (or at least ponder):

• Look at possiblity to use the Wiki Object Model instead of the Page Object Model / SMWWriter combo (which unfortunately is not SMW 1.6 compliant anymore)
• See if/how I can make more use of the new infrastructure in SMW, summarized by Markus in this post in SMW devel mailinglist.
• Take an overall fresh look at the architecture of the code ... try to follow Domain Driven Design principles much better, to get clean maintaineable code.
• Use existing MediaWiki feature uch more, such as the HTMLForm form builder class (for Specialpages and the like).
  (More suggestions like this highly welcome!)
• Import ARC2 library via the ARCLibrary extension rather than with a separate import.
• Use the existing "Equivalent URI" special property, instead of the custom "Original URI" (don't remember why I created a custom one...)
• Run big imports as jobs?
• OWL class import (as categories) ?
• Allow updating Wiki articles from any connected store, by using the new SMW Internals?
• Other things?

I would love to get some feedback and input to the project during this intensive week, so don't hesitate to drop in at #semantic-mediawiki on irc.freenode.net (IRC chat) or in the SMW-devel mailing list! My contact options, summarized:

• Follow code dev at github: github.com/samuell/RDFIO2
• RSS feed for commits of the above repo
• IRC: samuell # chat.freenode.net ( #semantic-mediawiki room )
• Mailinglist: SMW-devel
• Twitter: twitter.com/samuellampa
• G+: gplus.to/saml
• Skype: samuellampa
• Mail: samuel.lampa # gmail.com

Looking forward to your input during this week!