Month: October 2010

Geotagging in Ontopoly

We thought it might be interesting to show off one of the new features in 5.1.1: geotagging.

Let’s imagine that you are making a map of pubs, as some of us do. The geographical location of a pubs is a very important piece of information to attach to it, so let’s do that. We create two occurrence types, latitude and longitude, and give them the required PSIs. Once we’ve done that, the pub instance page looks like this:

Geotagging a pub #1

Note the little icon next to the latitude field. Clicking that will open a dialog window, as follows:

Geotagging dialog #1

If you now type in the address and click the “Search” button, and then zoom in, you see the following:

Geotagging a pub #2

This is the correct location, so we just click “Set position” at the bottom, and are done. Alternatively, you can click anywhere on the map to set a different position. After clicking “Set position” you come back to the topic, with the coordinates set, as shown below:

Geotagging a pub #2

An Ontopia/Joomla integration

At TMRA 2010 a team of Czech researchers at the University of Economics in Prague presented their integration of Ontopia with the Joomla! CMS. Joomla is written in PHP, so they used the TMRAP web service to invoke tolog queries on the Ontopia server, and then present the results with XSLT. They have a UI for managing this, and even a framework for building user-friendly tolog query builders.

For more information, see the presentation page, which has the full paper and the slides. (Later, it will also have a video of the presentation.)

David Damen becomes a committer

 

David Damen presenting Tropics

 

David Damen of Space Applications Services became an Ontopia committer today. David has been an active member of the Topic Maps community for a while, and right now he is working on Tropics, a web service interface to Ontopia, which he intends to add to the Ontopia sandbox in the near future. (He is on holiday at the moment, so it may take a while yet.)

We will return with more information on Tropics in the near future.

Ontopia gets an SDshare implementation

A prototype server implementation of the SDshare protocol was added to the sandbox today. The implementation is not yet tested, and somewhat incomplete, but good enough to be tried out. The readme file has more details, plus build instructions.

This particular implementation of SDshare allows the contents of one topic map to be replicated into another topic map, potentially on a different server. One use case is to have one hub server build a merged topic map from SDshare streams from a number of upstream servers. Another is to transfer updates from a staging server to a production server. And so on.

The implementation is being written for two reasons. One is to learn SDshare. The other is because Bouvet is likely to get a project which will be based on SDshare, in which case using Ontopia for some of the SDshare servers is one of the options we are exploring. So work on the implementation is likely to continue.

Note that the implementation is so far an SDshare server only. There is no client for the time being.

Ontopia+Liferay in Lithuania

Andrius Lauraitis reports from Kaunas in Lithuania that he has been able to install the Ontopia/Liferay integration and set up a simple site with it. We’re impressed, since the integration is still in its early stages, and the installation is non-trivial. The site is in Lithuanian, but the screenshots still speak for themselves.

This is the front page, with the YahooTree portlet on the right showing a topic hierarchy:

Front page

This is the page for an individual topic, showing the related topics on the right:

Topic page