[topicmapmail] TM for Linux desktop

[Murray Altheim]

Carlo Moneti wrote:
[...]
> Thank you all for the comments of this thread. It got a little side-tracked 
> from the start; but it has shown me that people are thinking about it. What 
> continues to intrigue me is the idea of a topic map engine framework, much 
> like a GUI framework, which is used to build a variety of applications that 
> would comprise a desktop environment (as gnome, KDE, etc., do). In fact, 
> the GUI framework would grow an API to interact with the TM engine, to the 
> point that new developers would see the TM approach as the cool 
> architecture style of the GUI framework, without necessarily knowing much 
> about the theory of TM, thesauri, taxonomies, faceted classification, etc.. 
> But they would come to realize that knowledge as they become more 
> experienced with the framework.

Carlo,

I can only smile at what you're saying, because that's precisely what
I'm building with Ceryle. It literally is a GUI framework encapsulating
a Topic Map engine, with visualization and TM editing capabilities, a
native XML database, and a Faceted Classification-style organizational
model, with some inferencing features. Its ostensible purpose is to act
as a tool to assist authors in developing novels, but as a framework it's
pretty general purpose. It uses a desktop metaphor, similar to MS Word,
Adobe Photoshop, etc. having various internal frame types, called Views
(DocumentView, GraphView, etc.). I'm currently working on the Faceted
Classification functionality, which are not trivial. The dialog boxes
themselves take a lot of support behind the scenes, such as active
traversal of the Topic Map to obtain and edit facets and facet properties
from facet hierarchies, etc.

Unfortunately, Ceryle is not finished yet; I'd hoped to have it done by
this past fall, but one person doing all the development takes more time
than a team, and it's proven to be a bigger task than I first thought.
And I really at this point can't open up development to a team since the
work is part of my Ph.D. program. I hope to have a first public release
this spring.

Jack Park, Alexander Johannesen and I have been discussing the idea of
a plug-in architecture so that tool developers who want to extend
Ceryle have a ready means of doing so. Both Jack and Alexander have
some very clever ideas for what they'd like to do with it.

BTW, Ceryle is 100% Java and will be released under Apache-style license.

> The other thought is the prospect of topic map storage data models---which 
> often look like they could store any kind of data (a generic data 
> model)---facilitating a sharing of data among applications and thereby 
> paving the way to easy application integration. Coupled with the TM/GUI 
> framework and desktop environment, the possibilities seem promising.

This is almost a moot point if you're using TM4J, which has a
persistent storage backend as an option. You have both an
in-memory, Ozone or Hibernate backend as the means of storage.
As I mentioned in my previous message, I think it'd be relatively
trivial to create a command line interface to TM4J, and honestly,
simple GUIs aren't hard to develop either, such as ones that
merely mirror the command line functionality. It's when you try
to develop visualization, editing, etc. that things get tough.

But in a nutshell, I strongly agree with you. :-)

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

  "The [GM] report says only half the people that took part - and
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  said Paul Rylott, of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council (ABC),
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