Extension:Halo Extension

The Halo extension is an extension to Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) and has been developed as a part of Project Halo in order to facilitate the use of Semantic Wikis for a large community of users. Main focus of the development was to create tools that increase the ease of use of SMW features and advertise the immediate benefits of semantically enriched contents.

Features
Halo enhances SMW by providing intuitive graphical interfaces that facilitate the authoring, retrieval, navigation and organization of semantic data in SMW.

It basically comprises:


 * Semantic Toolbar, allowing to quickly inspect, create and alter the semantic annotations of a wiki article
 * Advanced Annotation Mode, for annotating contents semantically in a WYSIWYG-like manner without having to cope with the wiki source text
 * Auto-completion, suggesting entities or data existing in the wiki while typing (e.g. when annotating in the wiki-text or filling in input fields)
 * Graphical query interface, empowering users to easily compose queries and preview query results with different output formats
 * Ontology browser, enabling intuitive browsing and changing of the wiki's ontology and lookup of instance and property information

Further information and documentation can be found at:
 * Halo info page
 * Halo manual
 * download from sourceforge

Ontoprise also distributes a free of charge pre-configured and ready-to-use bundle of the Halo extension (including MediaWiki, Semantic MediaWiki and other useful extensions) which is also known as SMW+:
 * SMW+ info page
 * article showing enterprise applications and use cases at Business applications with SMW+, a Semantic Enterprise Wiki

Requirements
The Halo extension requires access to a command line interpreter. Follow this external link to see a list of further requirements for installing version 1.5.3.

Optional patches
Some optional patches to the MediaWiki core can be applied to extend Halos usability features.