User:Jeroen De Dauw

I'm a MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki developer, and am currently in the top 25 of all time contributors. I'm doing contracted work for the Wikimedia Foundation, WikiWorks and other MediaWiki related organizations or companies as well as some volunteer work. I'm best known for creating the Maps and Semantic Maps extensions.

My extensions
Extensions I've created:

Maps · Semantic Maps · Validator · Storyboard · UK geocoding for Maps · Article Import (unreleased) · Awesomeness

Extensions I've made substantial additions to:

Semantic MediaWiki

Extensions I've made small contributions to:

Semantic Forms · Semantic Result Formats

Support and suggestions for my work
Please post all support questions and suggestions at the local resources, for example talk pages, as opposed to privately contacting me. This will enable everyone to reply, and allows for future references. Feel free to make a donation to support my work.

My MediaWiki-development career
This is a general overview of my career as MediaWiki developer. (And yes, I stole this awesome idea from Yaron.) For specific things I developed, and when, you might want to have a look at the version history (change log) page of the relevant extension.

2009
In February 2009, I attended FOSDEM 2009, where I followed, amongst various others, a presentation by Brion Vibber about MediaWiki, that I found quite interesting. I was also present at the closing session of FOSDEM, which was about Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2009. At this time I did not plan to do anything with what I've learned then. After a few weeks though, I came to the conclusion I could just as well give participating in GSoC a try, and went over the list of mentoring organizations. Since Wikimedia Foundation had a couple of nice PHP projects, and I was interested in it anyway, I had a good look at the proposed project list. A proposal to fix up Semantic Layers, a mapping extension using OpenLayers with Semantic Capabilities, caught my attention. I contacted the person who posted this idea (which was Yaron), and got some enthusiastic feedback. I got accepted for this project, which was the start of my first developer involvement in MediaWiki.

In May and June, the first 2 'coding period' months of GSoC, I familiarized myself with the involved technologies, including MediaWiki, Semantic MediaWiki (SMW), Semantic Layers (SL) and Semantic Google Maps (SGM). After starting off trying to modify and fix up SL, me and Yaron decided it was better to start from scratch, and build a general mapping extension that supported both Google Maps and OpenLayers. The name for this new extension would be Semantic Maps (SM), which I developed further during that period.

In July and August, the second half of GSoC, I decided to create a separate 'Maps' extension, on top of Semantic Maps, instead of only SM, after an awesome suggestion by Sergey Chernyshev. In this period, I completed the geocoding functionality and the display_point, result format and form input support for Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps and OpenLayers. This allowed people to easily display maps with both coordinates and addresses, then aggregate and filter this information semantically, and be able to insert new coordinates or edit them easily via form interfaces. In this period I released the first version of both Maps and Semantic Maps, making the SGM, Google Geocoder and SL extensions obsolete. Some other versions also followed. Version 0.3 was released just before the code submission deadline of GSoC, and was the last version included in the submission.

September and October where pretty occupied for me, so I had little time to do MW work. I got aware of an effort to get mapping onto Wikipedia, by using OpenLayers and OpenStreetMap, and proposed Maps for this purpose, since it would offer many advantages over extensions orientated to specific mapping services. I was only able to release version 0.3.4 of Maps and Semantic Maps, which nevertheless included a lot of important refactoring with as goal to make a real general mapping platform of Maps. Soon after this release, I gave a presentation titled Semantic Mapping with MediaWiki in Gent, demonstrating the usage of both Maps and SM. I also create and committed an aliasing system for semantic result formats in SMW, which is now used by Semantic Maps.

In November I released version 0.4 of Maps and SM, a very important milestone. Some big new features such as a function to display maps without any markers, smart geocoding and an OSM service, where added. The 'under the hood' changes where even more important, since they where the last steps in making Maps and Semantic Maps completely modular, for both mapping services and functionality. For a complete list of changes to Maps in 0.4, see the log. On 7 and 8 November I attended Semantic MediaWiki Camp (SMWC) 2009 in Germany, where I gave a presentation about the usage of Maps and Semantic Maps. I attended most talks, including several by Yaron (who I finally got to meet), Markus and Denny, the organizes of the event. In the middle of the month I released 2 minor updates to Maps and Semantic Maps with as main goal to increase stability and address some important issues. I also released a screencast demonstrating how to use the display_map parser function of Maps.

In December I released a new extension, Validator, which facilitates different aspects of parameters handling for other extensions. On the same day I also released Maps and Semantic Maps 0.5, both using Validator to do part of their parameter validation, defaulting and error reporting. These releases also included a lot of important refactoring and some important new features, such as static map support and support for Yarons new Special:Ask page's parameter handling to the query printers. Together with writing Maps 0.5, I also did a much needed update of the developer docs, and created a new screencast covering the usage of the display_point parser function. Later in the month, I released Validator 0.2, which mainly focused on list types and output formats. Again, Maps and SM has a release using this new version on the same day. These 0.5.1 releases included several minor new features and 2 small bug fixes, as well as some code clean-up of the static map support.

2010
In January I released a minor new version of Maps and Semantic Maps, with version number 0.5.2. This update mainly focuses on bug fixes and stability, but introduce some new features and code improvements.

In the beginning of February I gave a talk titled "Semantic Mapping with Mediawiki" at the Zebrastraat in Gent, Belgium, introducing the audience to Mediawiki and Semantic Mediawiki, followed by a walk through of how Maps and Semantic Maps can be used. I also released Maps and Semantic Maps 0.5.3, which like the previous update mainly focuses on bug fixes and stability. Later this month I started working for Wikimedia Foundation on the Storyboard extension and on Semantic MediaWiki for the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

In March, I released Maps and Semantic Maps 0.5.4 and 0.5.5, as well as Validator 0.2.2. I also created a small extension to Maps titled "UK geocoding for Maps" for Neill Mitchell at Prescient Software Ltd. Furthermore I created two command line scripts to import and parse all pages from a super category on a remote wiki as my first project for WikiWorks, which I later upgraded to an extension with GUI.

In April I attended the 2010 MediaWiki developer conference in Berlin. Although I did not publish any new releases, I did a lot of work on Storyboard, Validator 0.3, Maps 0.6 and Semantic Maps 0.6. In this month I also was accepted for Google Summer of Code 2010, to create an extension management platform for MediaWiki.

And that's the story, until now, of my MediaWiki career. You can read more about my MediaWiki work at my blog.

Contact info

 * Email: jeroendedauw at gmail dot com
 * Skype: rts.bn.vs
 * Xfire: bn2vs
 * Live messenger: jeroendedauw at gmail dot com
 * Google talk: jeroendedauw
 * IRC: JeroenDeDauw
 * MediaWiki SVN repo name: jeroendedauw

My pages

 * Blog
 * Wiki
 * CV
 * Ohloh profile
 * TCP profile
 * SourceForge profile