News of the Topic Maps Lab

Local TV channel is covering the Topic Maps based portal about Karl-Benjamin Preusker

news@topicmapslab.de (Lutz Maicher) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 21:27:56 +0000

The video is available here

MaJorToM server v. 1.0.0 released

news@topicmapslab.de (Lutz Maicher) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 08:13:12 +0000

Today the Topic Maps Lab has released the version 1.0.0 of the MaJorToM server. The server acts as TMQL endpoint for Topic Maps based applications. You can play around with an instance of the server here.

The sources of the MaJorToM server are available at Google code. In the installation instructions you will learn how you can build and deploy your own instances of the MaJorToM server. Once you have deployed the server for your own, you will have an administration interface and a TMQL interface. But the server is not only a TMQL endpoint for the data. It also provides full text search (based on Beru) and a SPARQL enpoint to the hosted topic maps.

With the next release Maiana will act as a frontend for topic maps delivered by remote MaJorToM server. Besides the Maiana integration the MaJorToM server is very well integrated with TM2O - the OData provider for Topic Maps.

CouchTM Released

news@topicmapslab.de (Lutz Maicher) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:25:00 +0000

Apache CouchDB is a document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion. According to the website CouchDB is:

A document database server, accessible via a RESTful JSON API.
Ad-hoc and schema-free with a flat address space.
Distributed, featuring robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and management.
Query-able and index-able, featuring a table oriented reporting engine that uses JavaScript as a query language.

Inspired by the increasing impact of NoSQL approaches like CoucDB we developed CouchTM. This a TMAPI topic maps engine which uses the CouchDB as backend. CouchTM can be used like any other Java based topic maps engine. Hans-Henning Koch’s Bachlor thesis provides more information about CouchTM (in German). CouchTM as well CouchDB are available as open source.

Kuria v. 1.0.1 Released

news@topicmapslab.de (Lutz Maicher) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 08:10:15 +0000

Kuria provides a set of java annotations and a parser to generate bindings for widget classes. These bindings are used to create input masks, tables and trees for the annotated domain model. It is strongly advised to use Kuria inside Eclipse plug-ins or maven projects.

Kuria is completely independent from any Topic Maps technology. But the Ontology-based automatic generation of applications in Onotoa uses Aranuka in conjunction with Kuria.

The new Kuria version 1.0.1 is mainly bug fixing and provide the following new features:

added weight attribute to field annotations to set order of widgets
create widgets for annotated super classes in InputMask
added Annox support (only in non OSGi environments)

You will get the sources and the change log kor Kuria at Google Code.

Aranuka v. 1.1.0 Released

news@topicmapslab.de (Lutz Maicher) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 09:09:32 +0000

Aranuka is a framework which allows users to persist information stored in Java objects into a topic map without the need to implement the necessary calls to the used Topic Maps engine. The mapping between the Java model and the topic map is defined directly in the related model classes via Java-Annotations. The Annotations hold all information needed by Aranuka which makes it very easy to use Aranuka with an existing model or to change the model or mapping.

Besides some bug fixing the new and matured version 1.1.0 has the following new features (see the change log) :

add auto-generate flag to Id annotation → identifiers which are null will be generated if true
implemented TMQL query for session
added “addPackage” for class registration
using proxies for topic retrieval which enables lazy loading of attributes
implements count method of session /admin/documents

If you want to use Aranuka you can build it your own or you can download the the latest release at Google code. Getting started with the documentation for Aranuka.

TMQL4J 3.1.0 Released

news@topicmapslab.de (Lutz Maicher) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 12:31:34 +0000

The new version 3.1.0 of the TMQL4J query suite is released at Google code. TMQL4J is used in bunch of projects from the Topic Maps Lab to query and modify Topic Maps sources.

Besides some bug fixing the important changes for version 3.1.0 are:

new behavior of roles axis
- forward navigation return the roles of an association
- backward navigation returns the association acts as parent of a role
new behavior of players axis
- forward navigation return the players of a role or all roles of the association
- backward navigation returns the roles played by the topic
new roletypes axis
- forward navigation results in the role types of an association
- backward navigation results in the associations having a role with this type
new datatype axis
new update operator ‘REMOVE’ to update clause
- avaible for: names, occurrences, characteristics, locators, indicators, item, scope, topics, types, supertypes, subtypes, instances
characteristics added as alias for names and occurrences modification
add variants anchor as update context
new method @IResultSet
- toTopicMap: If the result set supports this operation, it will return a topic map copy containing only the topics and association contained in
- toCTM: If the result set supports this operation, it will return a CTM string or stream containing only the topics and association contained in
- toXTM: If the result set supports this operation, it will return an XTM string or stream containing only the topics and association contained in
- toJTMQR: If the result set supports this operation, it will return a JTMQR string or stream containing only the topics and association contained in
CTMResult
- rename method resultsAsMergedCTM to toCTM
- rename method resultsAsTopicMap to toTopicMap
XMLResult
- rename method resultsAsMergedXML to toXML
- add stream variant of method toXML
the arguments on update roles are modified argument before operator is the role type, the value after is the player
update-clause allow any value-expression in front of the operator
moving some classes
new function fn:max expecting two arguments
- context of count and counts
- e.g.: fn:max ( // tm:subject , fn:count ( . / tm:name )) to get the maximum number of names a topic instance contains
new function fn:min expecting two arguments
- context of count and counts
- e.g.: fn:min ( // tm:subject , fn:count ( . / tm:name )) to get the minimum number of names a topic instance contains
value-expression supports boolean-expression to return true or false
the update handler checks the value of occ and variants according to the datatype (validate the value for the given datatype)
- a pragma was added to disable this functionality datatype-validation
the update of variants and occurrences will reuse the datatype instead of setting string automatically, like TMAPI do
- a pragma was added to disable this functionality datatype-binding
allow prepared argument add new positions:
- as optional axis argument
- as part of update value

You can use the TMQL canonizer to check you TMQL queries against the new version. The full change log and the source code is available at Google code.

MaJorToM v. 1.2.0 Released

news@topicmapslab.de (Lutz Maicher) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 11:08:24 +0000

Our topic maps engine MaJorToM is used in a bunch of projects of the Topic Maps Lab, i.e. it is the backbone for Maiana. Besides some bug fixing the new and matured version 1.2.0 provides paging with the following methods:

new interface IPagedTopicMap with following methods
- List:getAssociations(int, int)
- List:getAssociations(int, int, Comparator)
- long:getNumberOfAssociations()
- List:getTopics(int, int)
- List:getTopics(int, int, Comparator)
- long:getNumberOfTopics()
new methods at IPagedConstructIndex
- List:getAssociations(int, int)
- List:getAssociations(int, int, Comparator)
- long:getNumberOfAssociations()
- List:getTopics(int, int)
- List:getTopics(int, int, Comparator)
- long:getNumberOfTopics()
new getNumberOf… methods at paged indexes

You can read the full change log for MaJorToM here.

If you want to start working with MaJorToM you can build it your own or you can download the jar files for the latest version at Google code. Start with the documentation have a look at the javadoc for MaJorToM.

TMQL canonizer Released

news@topicmapslab.de (Lutz Maicher) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:51:48 +0000

Today the Topic Maps Lab has released the TMQL canonizer, which is an online validation service for TMQL queries.The service uses the TMQL draft of 2008 and the tmql4j query engine version 3.1.0.

As depicted in the figure below the service returns the canonical form of a given query. Furthermore the parse tree is given. In the case the given TMQL query is not valid, the parse error is returned in details.

The TMQL canonizer is online available. Simply try the following TMQL query:

// http://psi.topicmapslab.de/inventurtool/project MINUS http://psi.topicmapslab.de/inventurtool/uses >> typed >> roles >> players

The code of the servlet is available as open source in the TMQL4J project at Google code.

UPDATE 2011-04-15: The canonizer now supports not only the 2008 draft of TMQL, but also the 2010 and 2011 draft.

Spreadsheet Data Connector Released

news@topicmapslab.de (Lutz Maicher) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 09:50:18 +0000

This project contains an abstract layer on top of the Apache POI library. This abstraction layer provides the Spreadsheet Query Language - eXql and additional method to access spreadsheets. The current version is designed to support the XLS and XLSX format of Microsoft© Excel® files.

The Spreadsheet Data Connector is well suited for all use cases where you have to access data in Excel sheets and you need a sophisticated language to address and query the data.

Currently the Spreadsheet Data Connector is used in our social topic maps explorer Maiana. In example the information for the topic places is extracted in runtime from an Excel® sheet by using the Spreadsheet Data Connector.

A download and the code is available as Open Source under the Apache Licence 2.0.

Preusker 2011 - cooperation with the Archaeological Heritage Office of Saxony and TML consulting

news@topicmapslab.de (Lutz Maicher and Sven Windisch) — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 12:29:09 +0000

Karl Benjamin Preusker (* 22. September 1786 in Löbau; † 15. April 1871 in Großenhain) is the founding father of scientific archaeology and general public education in the former kingdom of Saxony.

Under the patronage of the Saxony state minister Prof. v. Schorlemmer this year the Preusker Jahr 2011 is celebrated. The Archaeological Heritage Office of Saxony, it’s native town Löbau and the home town of the Preusker library Großenhain partnered to provide a series of exhibitions and events about Preusker.

The Topic Maps Lab and TML-Consulting support the consortium to provide more information about Preusker. The first outcome of this cooperation is a portal about the correspondence of Preusker. Thanks to this portal the users will be get an impression about the social network of Preusker.

The Topic Maps Lab was exhibiting at the CeBIT 2011.

news@topicmapslab.de (Anika Jahn) — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 18:09:35 +0000

With more than 4200 companies from about 70 countries, the CeBIT is the biggest event of the digital industry. According to the fair’s theme “Work and Life with the cloud”, we presented semantic data integration solutions in Maiana, our flexible and social Topic Maps Explorer….and there was a huge amount of interest, both from scientific and economic side. As you can see, it was an inspiring event for everyone.

TMLab @ CeBIT 2011

Press coverage for Thomaner project

news@topicmapslab.de (Lutz Maicher) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:03:19 +0000

In 2012 Leipzig will celebrate the 800th anniversary of the famous boy choral Thomaner. Funded by the German Research Foundation and in cooperation with historians at the University of Leipzig the Lab is working on a database for the chorale’s repertoire from 1808 to 2008. Naturally the whole solution will base on Topic Maps.

In preparation of the launch in late autumn this year the local newspaper covered the project with an article in print and a slightly different on the website (both are in GERMAN).

See the whole press coverage of the Lab here.

JTM writer 1.0 released as open source

news@topicmapslab.de (Lutz Maicher) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 15:01:53 +0000

The JTM writer is a Java based deserializer for the JSON topic maps notation. The source code is now available at Google Code . The JTM writer is in productive usage in Maiana and other projects of the Lab.

Maiana February Release

news@topicmapslab.de (Uta Schulze and Michael Prilop) — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 21:54:33 +0000

New design: Check out our fresh new design to present data in a topic map (e.g. the Opera Topic Map). Do you like it? We also extended the ‘Overview’ box to summarize every action available to the topic map. Last but not least, we added pagination to avoid long load time and vertical scrolling.
New TMQL4J version: We now run on TMQL4J v. 3.1.0-SNAPSHOT (see TMQL4J 3.0.0 Release News for more information). Currently, only queries compliant to the TMQL draft of 2008 are supported.
Donating queries: TMQL and SPARQL queries which until now could only be used privately may now be set public. Thus enabling sharing of queries or simply promoting a interesting query result. An overview of queries may be found on the users corresponding profile page.
Syntax Highlighting of TMQL Queries: And because reading queries is difficult as it is we now use syntax highlighting displaying queries and even some autocompletion (try typing “FOR”)
“More about this subject”: To enhance the browsing experience we now look up additional information whilst visiting a topic page. This expands our use of the Semantic Search to also show topics available in visible maps on Maiana and even providing similarity information (Opera).
Maiana Search Provider: Do you like using your browsers search field? Try adding Maiana as a search provider and find more, faster!

Maiana will be presented at CeBIT 2011, Hall 5, Stand E02!

New MaJorToM Topic Map Store based on redis

news@topicmapslab.de (Sven Krosse and Benjamin Bock) — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 14:14:20 +0000

Today we added a new backend to the powerful Topic Maps engine MaJorToM: the Redis Topic Map Store. Redis is an open source, advanced key-value-store supporting strings, sets, hashes and lists as values. The code is published at the MaJorTom Google Code project.

The new topic map store is the perfect combination of a light-weight and persistent data store. It enables a parallel access without the need to implement own thread locking mechanism. Redis is easy to administrate and enables very fast read and write access. Additionally it allows replication to multiple servers using its built-in sharding functionality.

To make a topic map storage within a Redis database, we recreated the schema of the Topic Maps Data Model based on the Redis possibilities. The Schema is documented here. We are looking forward for comments on both the Redis store and the schema.

Update 2011-04-14: Johannes Schmidt has published another proposal for mapping of the Topic Maps Data Model to Redis schema.

Tmql4j Suite 3.0.0 Released

news@topicmapslab.de (Sven Krosse) — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 11:41:46 +0000

The new version 3.0.0 of the tmql4j query suite was released at google code. In this version tmql4j is more flexible and powerful to satisfy every business use case.

As a major modification, the engine architecture and processing model was changed. The new suite contains two different TMQL runtimes, one for each TMQL draft. The drafts are split to avoid ambiguity and conflicts during the querying process. The stack-based processing model is replaced by a more flexible one to enable multi-threaded optimizations.

Each style of the 2008 draft and each part of the topic map modification language ( TMQL-ML ) has been realized in different modules. Because of that, the user can decide which styles and parts of the query language should be supported.

In addition, a new language module was added to enable flexible template definitions, which enables control of the result format of the querying process in the most powerful way. Templates can be used to return results in HTML, XML, JSON or any other format. The results will be embedded automatically by the query processor.

The new version also comes with a couple of other useful features .

In contrast to the draft, the engine supports filter after each navigation step.
New axes, like the typed and variants axis, are added to the navigation handler.
Result processing has been fully re-implemented, which enables the possibility of empty cells and really atomic cell values.
The engine supports result column aliases, similar to SQL, which can be used to navigate through the result set.
The engine supports prepared statements to speed up your application.
A couple of new functions are added to fetch the ontology of the topic map or topics by their characteristic values.
The new language version comes with a new group-by-clause, that enables an index-based arrangement of the result set.
Similar to the select-style, the flwr-style supports the limit-, offset- and unique-clauses.

Onotoa covered by Eclipse magazine

news@topicmapslab.de (Lutz Maicher) — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 11:04:59 +0000

The latest issue of the Eclipse magazine covers our TMCL editor Onotoa with an article written by the lead developer Hannes Niederhausen (in German). Furthermore version 1.1.1 is available at the CD which is bundled with the magazine. Unfortunately this version is of limited interested because the new version 1.2 will be release very soon - with a bunch of new features.

Here you can purchase this issue of the Eclipse magazine.

Practical Semantics seminar in Leipzig covered by the German Ministry (BMBF) website

news@topicmapslab.de (Lutz Maicher) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 21:45:38 +0000

The German Ministry for Research and Educations (BMBF) which is the current funding organisation behind the Topic Maps Lab published an wrap-up of the practical semantics seminar in Leipzig at the website of the funding programme.

The next seminar will take place on February 23, 2011 in Utrecht.

Read the full article (in German) here.

Maiana 2010 release

news@topicmapslab.de (Uta Schulze) — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 16:26:53 +0000

September (TMRA) Release: Most of the new features - like the Subject Feed of a topic map and the faceted search - have been presented at TMRA 2010 in Leipzig.

Map and Subject Feed: “Upload” and “URL” maps can be updated via the web interface or TMQL update queries. But from now on, you may actually watch these updates in a topic map. Each map offers a Map and several Subject Feeds: the Map Feed informs you about all changes in the topic map - the creation of topics, the update of name and occurrence values, the participation in associations and so on. Additionally, using the Subject Feed one may watch a particular topic of interest.
Faceted Search: When searching the full text index of a large topic map with a more general search term, e.g. searching the Opera Topic Map for opera, the user can easily get lost in the overwhelming number of results. To address this problem, we included the topic types of the search results in a faceted manner. The user is now able to reduce the number of displayed results by selecting and deselecting any topic type she is not interested in.
OSM/Google Maps support for geo-typed occurrences: This is a gadget appearing in maps that include topics representing places. A topic that owns any occurrence of data type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Geodetic_System_1984 - usually known as the triple of latitude, longitude and an optional value for the height - has a little map icon that reveals an Open Street Map visualization of the given coordinate.

October Release

New design: While adding more and more features to Maiana we felt the need to improve the user interface, too. This is a work in progress so stay tuned for more eye candy in the future.
Renew API key: The Maiana API key is as important as the pair of your user name and password. In any case of security emergency, e.g. if you lost or accidentally published your API key, you can click on “renew API key” on your Maiana profile page and the compromised key will be disabled.
Maiana API: Query with TMQL: The Topic Maps Query Language (TMQL) is a powerful query language in the field of Topic Maps. With the opening of the Maiana API for TMQL queries of all kinds, every Maiana user can now benefit of this power. You can discover how easy it is to use the Maiana API by having a quick look at the Maiana API documentation.
Feature overview for map types: Have you ever wondered which features of Maiana are available for the different types of maps, e.g. the “Upload” map? You may inform yourself by clicking on the help button at the “Create Topic Map” part on your dashboard or by opening the “Features” tab of a map (e.g. the ToyTM).

November Release

Container: References Tab: Maiana Containers are for virtual merging different maps we are calling “references”. In the past, the information about active references was hidden for every user except the owner of the container. Now, the new “Reference” tab reveals this useful information: for example, it shows which maps have been merged to create the “Operas” Container.
Social Tab and Editors: Maiana wants to be a social topic maps platform. With the introduction of the new “Editor” role this is now taken to a new level. Any user who has been invited as editor to a map in the “Social” tab may now view this map (similar to users that own the “Viewer” role) AND may edit it in the web-interface or by executing TMQL update queries.
Maiana API: Search in maps: While having remote access to the data structure of a topic map with the TMQL querying facility of the Maiana API is great, the flexibility of TMQL may sometimes be unnecessary. For this reason, we opened up the full text search functionality of Maiana with the new API method called search_endpoint. You can perform any search and receive the results as JSON objects as described in the Maiana API documentation.
RDF/N3 export of a topic map: When speaking about the Semantic Web, one usually thinks of RDF in one of its various formats. We strongly support the Semantic Web ideas of opening up data silos and connecting all available public data. And we want Maiana to play its part in this game. So we made the export of whole Maiana maps as RDF/XML and RDF/N3 easily available in the “Download map data” menu of each downloadable map.
New map type: XLS: We love Topic Maps and structured data in general. But the vast majority of data out there is semi- to unstructured. In the continuing effort to provide tools for better handling of data, we introduced the new “XLS” map type that allows the upload of a mapping definition file for Excel files. This way, the tabular-structured components of an Excel file may be viewed and used like any other topic map.
Renaming of JLI to DB: To distinguish between JLI access to Excel files and relational databases we renamed the former “JLI” part of the “Create topic map” form to “DB”.

December Release

Notifications: We introduced notification e-mails that inform about users following you and watching or commenting on your maps. Of course, the notifications may be deactivated on the profile page.

Excel is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.