Slides from a talk on SMWCon 2016. In this talk, I will tell you the story of semantic::core, our SMW distribution born from the enterprise and built for the enterprise. Since its first release in 2011 a lot of things changed. In the meanwhile, the complete build process is automated, idempotent and available for Ubuntu LTS, Debian, OpenSuse and SLES operating systems. This gives us the ability to create rock-solid SMW deployments from single-instance environments to multi-instance environments with hundreds of boxes, e.g. in an industrial context using our wikiboxx. https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2016/semantic_core_-_A_look_back_into_seven_years_of_Enterprise_Class_MediaWiki_and_an_outlook_into_the_future

1. semantic:: core - A look back into sever years…
Alexander Gesinn

2. semantic::core
• Enterprise class wiki distribution
based on MediaWiki and its
Semantic extensions
• Born from the enterprise and
built for the enterprise
© 2016 gesinn.it GmbH & Co. KG. All rights reserved. 2

3. © 2016 gesinn.it GmbH & Co. KG. All rights reserved. 3
The Software Stack

4. The Early Years
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• single OS
• error-prone
• time-consuming

5. The Early Years
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not scaling well…

6. First Automation…
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• simplified setup
• but not idempotent
• difficult to update
existing setups
• difficult to support
multiple OS
growing number of
sources

7. First Automation…
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multi OS often requires
„multi admin“

8. Automation first!
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• multi OS
• idempotent
• fully automated
class { 'mediawiki':
server_name => 'localhost:8080',
admin_email => 'wikitest@testing.com',
db_root_password => ‘secretpwd',
doc_root => '/var/www/wikis',
temp_dir => '/vagrant/.tmp',
tarball_url => 'https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki
tarball => 'mediawiki-1.27.1.tar.gz',
mediawiki_dir => 'mediawiki-1.27.1',
}

9. The Wiki Factory
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OS independant
semantic::core
„binary“
• Bare Metal
• Hypervisors
• Cloud
• Embedded

10. The Wiki Factory
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master/client
multi node setup
and maintenance

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The Content

12. semantic::apps
• semantic::apps are modular and reusable business
applications for collaboration and documentation
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Contact Location ProcessProject

13. semantic::apps fully featured
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• ~50 forms
• ~230 templates
• ~2700 pages in total

14. Content Management – The Early Years
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• Java Bot > MW API
• i18n support
• but difficult to
maintain

15. Content Management – Today
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• Model driven
• Only very little MW
syntax left
• Ability to
migrate/curate

16. gesinn.it GmbH & Co. KG
Am Koweiher 8f, 92521 Schwarzenfeld
Franz-Mayer-Str 1, 93053 Regensburg
+49 9435 65218-0
http://gesinn.it
@gesinn_it