Raw

Markus Krötzsch just gave a heads-up on the forthcoming release ( announcement on Sourceforge list hasn't shown up yet). There's quite a list of changes, but the best thing to do is just go look at San Diego. I've no doubt Markus and his team know what their doing when it comes to the Semantic side, which is the novel and interesting stuff here, but paradoxically what jumps out at you are the design aspects inherited from MediaWiki - visually appealling, very usable. Building on this codebase is one thing they've got very right (even if it is PHP ;-) and it's impressive how seamless the Geo/RDF stuff is integrated.

The Simple semantic search page does what it says, very nice. There's an in-place test of whether or not it's a good thing : does it feel right in MediaWiki? Yes it does, very natural. I could imagine this becoming one of those features that you use every day without thinking about it. One little nit - this page could really do with links to the Relation, Attribute (and maybe Datatype) category pages. I had to hunt around to find what values I could put in these boxes (and it's not obvious that you get results from partial string matches). Maybe there's an Ajax widget that might work here. I imagine you might expect up to a couple of hundred possible values for relations and attributes, bit too much for a drop-down list.

There's already a page for Sheffield, but curiously it doesn't mention the the Wapentake, Leadmill, Hallamshire, Frog and Parrot, Fagan's, Washington, Hanover, Vine, Devonshire Arms, Pomona, Porter, Lescar, Cremorne, Broadfield, White Lion, Red Lion, Nottingham House, Broomhill Tavern, Springfield Tavern... I guess that's what Wikis are for.