Monday, June 18, 2007

Server upgraded; dataset support online

The OmegaWiki.org server has been upgraded to Debian etch. This gives us PHP 5.2.0, which is needed to run the latest version of OmegaWiki. (In the process, we exchanged our hand-compiled PHP and Apache binaries with distribution packages.) OmegaWiki itself has also been upgraded. The current version of the code has support for so-called "data-sets".

A data-set is essentially an instance of OmegaWiki which can contain a completely separate set of DefinedMeanings and associated data. This is useful for importing authoritative sources which may either not yet be fully editable, or which are meant to be retained alongside an editable version. It also allows us to showcase imported databases, to convince organizations that own the data to release it freely and make it fully editable.

The current version already supports mapping DefinedMeanings across data-sets. So you can indicate that concept A in data-set 1 is the same as concept B in data-set 2. However, it does not yet support copying data from one data-set to another, which is what we are working on right now (some hints to it are already in the code).

Currently OmegaWiki has a single data-set only. We are considering to set up some example data-sets to let the user community play with this new functionality.

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