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.
David Damen of SpaceApps has posted a proposal for a new RESTful web service interface to Ontopia. In a posting to the mailing list he says that SpaceApps is looking for community feedback on the API before they start implementing it later this summer.
At this point it is not clear whether the new API will become part of Ontopia, or whether it will be placed in the sandbox. The community feedback on the mailing list will determine the outcome.
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.
As the first external collaborator, Space Applications Services of Belgium has announced that they are joining the Ontopia project. Their intention is to use Ontopia in their ongoing Topic Maps projects, and also to lead the implementation of the TMQL standard and possibly also TMCL.
Here is the announcement in Space Applications Services’s own words.
Ontopia's Blog 