User:Nischayn22/Gsoc

Identity
Name:  Nischay Nahata Email: nischayn22@gmail.com Project title: Green SMW

Contact/working info
Timezone: Asia/Kolkata UTC +5:30 Typical working hours: 8AM to 1AM (flexible) IRC handle(s): Nischayn22 Skype name: nischay.nahata gtalk nick: nischayn22

Project summary
This project is about increasing the performance of SMW as suggested by Markus Krötzsch. Semantic MediaWiki is about making extensive use of the data in a wiki such that it can be processed and queried dynamically, but at present it is not in a state to be integrated with huge projects like Wikipedia for various performance reasons. But we believe that it the near future it can revolutionize the usage of Wikipedia, by extending its usage for querying data and computer-processing. Besides, many other wikis currently use Semantic MediaWiki. Here are a few performance degradation issues reported with SMW My proposal is to improve the performance by making efficient use of the database (these would bring us closer to our target of integrating SMW to MediaWiki) This can be achieved in steps
 * High frequency of writes to the database (writes occur even if nothing has changed)
 * Database design with many DataItems in mind,(Currently SMW has restricted this number to <10 )this has caused some inefficiency in design now.
 * a few more can/shall be added here.
 * Performing a write to the database only if something has changed (SMW properties change very rarely in a wiki page, so we perform operations only when something has changed)
 * Improve the current Database implementation
 * a lot more can/shall be added here as Markus suggested this is a very open project

About you
Hi! My name is Nischay Nahata, an engineering student from National Institute of Technology, India. In a year I will complete my B.tech in Information Technology. I like to code mostly in C and PHP (also trying Python now). I am still new to FOSS, my love of code brought me here, and since then I am trying hard to become a core contributor to MediaWiki.This serves two purpose for me, getting to work with experienced developers from different parts of the world and contributing to Wikipedia with my knowledge of code.

Participation
I have been working for more than a month now with MediaWiki, and am familiar with the various ways of communication used here.
 * I am mostly online on IRC,Skype and Gtalk ( I usually try getting answers myself, otherwise try IRC and if still not successful I ask specific developers )
 * I plan to use github so that my mentor can keep track of my work
 * I also plan to blog a gist of my daily activities

Past open source experience
My Open-Source journey started at MediaWiki itself. Besides solving bugs and enhancements I have also been communicating with other developers and learned a lot.Here is a gist of my work for MW User:Nischayn22