Within the last year monthly Powl/OntoWiki downloads were skyrocketing. Check out OntoWiki’s Sourceforge statistics page, do get more details. They effectively quadrupled within the last year, reached now a level of 400-500 monthly downloads and we expect even higher increases in the upcoming year, as OntoWiki will significantly mature, include many more additional features and be overall easier-to-use also for knowledge engineering novices.

Christian Weiske, one of our diploma students, has ran some benchmarks to compare his new PHP SparqlEngineDb to some other implementations (Jena, ARC, Redland). The results are surprising - in most cases, his new SPARQL Engine is faster then all competitors.

OntoWiki 0.7, which will be released in the next two weeks, will be shipped with this new engine and a nice SPARQL shell.

Detailed benchmark results are available at cweiske.de.

We’ve released the version 0.6 of our distributed knowledge engineering tool OntoWiki. We re-engineered most part of it to support a more flexible architecture with themes and plugins. OntoWiki is based now on the Zend Framework and requires PHP 5.2 (because of the new __toString() behavior).

This is the first stand-alone version of OntoWiki. It still includes Powl but we decided to release both tools separately to provide a more user-friendly installation and setup process.

Changes in this release includes a themeable interface, a guided installation, basic access control at model scope and some bugfixes in the class tree, the map tab and the auto suggestion feature.

Today our diploma student Christian Weiske finished the last bits of his RAP based database-driven SPARQL engine which implements most parts of the W3C recommendation now. Compared to the current memory-based SPARQL engine in RAP, SparqlEngineDb generates SQL queries to load off the hard work to the database engine. This speeds up SPARQL queries greatly, allowing operation on millions of RDF statements with ease, and without worrying about PHP memory consumption.

A new version of RAP including the new engine will be released shortly. In the meantime, Powl and OntoWiki internals will be switched to use SPARQL queries making it possible to use different data backends.

Next week starts the Knowledge Construction Challenge from the CKC2007, a Workshop on Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge which is arranged in conjunction with the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007) in Banff, Canada.

The goal of the CKC challenge is to use the current state of the art for the tools as a jumping off point to collect and discuss requirements for such tools; features that users need; features that they like or dislike.

OntoWiki is one of the participating tools and we invite you to participate in the challenge.