The Topic Maps Lab is proud to announce the February 2010 Release of Maiana. What is Maiana? It is the first social Topic Maps explorer. It is a convenient service for hosting, browsing and sharing Topic Maps. Please have in mind: each map you upload to Maiana is private. You can can use the map for your own. And if you want to share your map with others you can invite friends or you simply put the map into the public. The world needs more topic maps, so start uploading your maps and donate them to the public.

Besides a lot of small fixes and enhancements in the user interface this release provides you some new core features in Maiana:

• For each topic of a public map Maiana provides you a widget which you can embed in your blog or website. This Maiana widget is a preview to the information you have stored about a subject - like the widget below for Puccini from the famous Opera map. Having these widgets you can organise your information in Maiana - and use them in your blogs and websites. Maiana will become your content provider. The widget mechanism uses the FLWOR style of the TMQL implementation in Maiana. The current generic widget is the beginning, within the next months we will improve the usability of the widget feature. Please drop us a note if you have ideas and issues concerning the widgets.

• Maiana is now deeply integrated with Subj3ct.com. Once you open a site of a specific topic, Maiana checks all Subject Identifiers in Subj3ct.com. If available, Maiana will provide you further Subject Identifiers, and even more interesting, more links in the web where you will find information about the current subject. Simply have a look at the Topic for Czech Republic in the ToyTM to get an impression of this integration.

• You can now update an existing map. In the dashboard simply click on the edit pencil right to the map you want to update and upload the new version of your map. The update feature allows you to always publish the latest version of your map. As main advantage all invitations and watchers for the map will persist.

• You can now upload your map directly from a URL. With this feature you save the cycle of downloading a map from the web and uploading it to Maiana.

• Maiana displays now nearly all details about your topic maps - even the scope of your variants or a list of occurrences scoped by a specific subject. If you miss a specific detail, please drop us a note.

Please support us with your feedback. Please join Maiana and drop your comments and bug reports into the “Something missing or not working?” box in the footer. In the meanwhile the Topic Maps Lab works on the next release of Maiana. Stay tuned!

Embedded Maiana widget for Giacomo Puccini:

Embed code for this Maiana widget:

<div class="maiana-widget"><div id="maiana-widget-content"></div><script src="https://maiana.topicmapslab.de/u/lmaicher/tm/opera/widget/FOR+%24c+IN+http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FPuccini+%3E%3E+characteristics+RETURN+%28%24c+%3C%3C+characteristics+%3E%3E+indicators+%5B0%5D+%2C+%24c+%3E%3E+types+%2F+tm%3Aname+%2C+%24c+%3E%3E+atomify+%29" type="text/javascript"></script></div>