Ontopia 5.1.3 beta 1 has just been released. This is a fairly minor release which fixes a few bugs and adds some minor new functionality. For the full details, please see the release notes.
Author: ontopia
A proposal for SDshare push
Lars Marius Garshol has posted a proposal for a push form of SDshare to the topicmapmail mailing list. The need for this form of the protocol is explained in this blog posting. Thoughts and opinions on the design are very much welcome.
Tropics added to Ontopia sandbox
David Damen of SpaceApps has checked in the first version of Tropics, the RESTful web service API to Ontopia discussed here earlier. The README file has build instructions, while more in-depth explanations can be found in the TMRA talk about Tropics. The design document describes the interface in more detail.
Why SDShare is useful
Lars Marius Garshol wrote a short blog posting outlining how SDShare works and what it can be used for. This might be useful reading for those wondering what the Ontopia SDShare implementation is good for.
Note that the SDShare implementation in Ontopia has now been extended with a client web application making it easy to pull changes from remote topic maps.
Ontopia and YQL
Trond Pettersen has written a small service to embed tolog in YQL (Yahoo Query Language), which he describes in a blog posting. Essentially, this takes a tolog query and the URI of a topic map, and produces JTM 1.1-like output suitable for further processing YUI3.
Ontopia 5.1.2 is released
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:
Note the little icon next to the latitude field. Clicking that will open a dialog window, as follows:
If you now type in the address and click the “Search” button, and then zoom in, you see the following:
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:
Ontopia 5.1.1 is released
After five betas Ontopia 5.1.1 was released today. The main changes in this version are support for geotagging in Ontopoly, pluggable support for authentication and authorization, and a number of bug fixes. See the changelog for further details.
The tolog optimizations in Ontopia
At TMRA 2010 it struck me that we’d never really documented or described the optimizations that we do on tolog queries, and so I thought it would be useful to explain that. I did this in a 5-minute presentation in the open space session, the slides to which are embedded below.
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.)
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