Month: October 2009

Toma implementation in Ontopia

Thomas Neidhart of SpaceApplications has implemented the Toma query language on top of Ontopia. Toma is a query language for Topic Maps designed by Rani Pinchuk of SpaceApplications. The implementation is currently in the sandbox part of Subversion, and not part of Ontopia proper, but the wiki page explains how to check it out and run it. Currently, Toma queries can only be run using a command-line client (or the API), but work is currently under way to make Toma available in the Omnigator query plug-in.

OKS and Ontopia

Some users who have written to us have been confused about the relationship between the old OKS (Ontopia Knowledge Suite) and the new open source Ontopia edition. They have also been confused about what is and isn’t allowed with the new open source edition. So we thought we’d post a little about that to make things clearer.

The commercial edition of the product, which existed from May 2001 until June 2009, was the Ontopia Knowledge Suite (OKS). It came in four different editions:

  • OKS Personal, which was just the engine.
  • OKS Professional, which was everything but the database backend.
  • OKS Enterprise, which was everything.
  • OKS Samplers, which was the free download. It was basically OKS Professional minus the tools for making new applications.

Now there is just Ontopia, which is almost exactly the same as the old OKS Enterprise. The difference is that we took out the code that deals with license keys since we don’t sell license keys any more. We also cleaned up a bit, and threw out some legacy stuff that nobody used.

As for what you can do with the new open source Ontopia that’s simple: anything the Apache Software License says you can do. Specifically, that means you can download it as many times as you want, install it anywhere you want, and use it for any purpose you want. All for free.

Ontopia Code Camp

We are arranging a code camp as part of the TMRA 2009 (Topic Maps Research and Applications) conference in Leipzig, on November 11. The code camp will introduce new developers and users to the project, the product suite, and show how to develop with (and for) Ontopia. At the end we’ll close with a discussion of what users and developers want to see from the project.

Lars Marius Garshol and Geir Ove Grønmo, the two lead developers of Ontopia since 2000, will be leading the code camp. For more information, please see the official code camp program.

We hope to see you in Leipzig!