20 October 2007
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Semantic MediaWiki 1.0
Version 1.0 of the Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) extension has recently been released, and we've upgraded to it here on Organic Design and our other wikia that use it. We haven't started using SMW on this site yet, but we intend to make heavy use of it in our new organisational system which is still in development.
A major change has been made in the new SMW version which is that attributes and relations have been unified into the single concept of properties. In earlier versions of SMW, properties with Type:Page were known as relations and only those used double colons (::) as the separator between property name and link text. All other properties (numbers, strings, etc.) were known as attributes and had to use colon equals (:=) as the separator.
SMW 1.0 unifies relations and attributes, calling them properties, and uses a single namespace "Property:". The default datatype for undeclared properties is Type:Page, but it is strongly recommended that you declare every property's type to clarify its intended use for other editors. SMW still supports := but it is recommended that you use :: for all property annotations. The reason is that the equality symbol contained in := cannot be used properly within MediaWiki template parameters, whereas :: causes no problems in most environments.
