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Trond Pettersen on Web Development and Topic Maps

Category: Semantic Web

Billy-Corgan.com Re-Launched as Topic Maps Based Website

Billy-Corgan.com was the first public web site I ever created and ran. I first started playing with it (and web techs) in 1998/99. In 2000, I moved it from GeoCities to its own domain name. The site had it’s golden age in 2003/2004, with up to 4 million page views / month. I believe that is a rather high number for a non-popish fan site. Back then it was a PHP/MySQL driven site.

In 2005 I decided to stop maintaining Billy-Corgan.com due to various reasons, the most prominent ones being a lack of time and a decreasing level of devotion (esp. with regards to the online community and drama that follows).

For the last 5 years the site has therefore contained little to no information. Up until 2 days ago, it did only contain the Machina II MP3s (Smashing Pumpkins released this album on the Internet, for free, back in 2000!). At the same time, there have been hundreds of daily visitors (Google Analytics stats). And the old MySQL database has been kept intact on my backup devices. Therefore, I recently decided to re-lauch the site with some of the “static” content (lyrics, discography, photos + MP3s as before). No need for it to remain empty, right?

Moving to Topic Maps

So: what to do when putting some old database content on the web? I did not want to create a huge new web site and spend a lot of time writing (plain) PHP scripts and SQL queries. Didn’t have time for that right now.

Well, obviously I chose to create a Topic Maps based web app, with Ontopia being my preferred Topic Maps engine.

I started by creating a couple of new database views (to make for a simpler mapping) and a few stored procedures for “sanitizing”  some of the data (used in the views’ SQL). From there, the remaining tasks were pretty simple:

  1. Create an LTM file (my preferred format) containing the ontology (concepts like Song, Person, Composer-Of, etc.). ~100 lines of LTM.
  2. Write a DB2TM mapping file, specifiying which columns are mapped to what Topic Maps concepts. 136 lines of XML.
  3. Write JSP files — as discussed in my previous post on Web App Development with Ontopia. Ended up with 10 specialized JSPs.

UI Functionality

I also wanted to add some “fun” functionality by creating an Ajax enabled photo gallery. I did explore some pre-built galleries such as Galleriffic, but ended up building my own using a combination of jQuery and jQuery cycle. The album degrades gracefully by not requiring JavaScript support — all links work without JS (example: 1979 vs. Zero).

Further, I implemented an audio “player” for the MP3s based on the HTML5 <audio /> element. At this time the browser support is very limited, though, as these are MP3s and not e.g. OGG. In the lack of MP3 audio support I fall back to using Flowplayer’s audio plugin (Flash based). I’ve also played with some CSS3 properties like border-radius, as seen on the index page (granted your browser supports either -webkit-border-radius, -moz-border-radius or border-radius (why so many?)).

The result can be viewed at Billy-Corgan.com.

No Comments by Trond on March 23, 2010
filed in Topic Maps
tagged , , , , ,

Web Application Development with Ontopia – 3. Creating the JSPs

Happy New Year 2010

After a busy December month, the Christmas vacation finally gave me some room to concentrate on what really matters.

Here’s my third blog post on building web apps with Ontopia. A bit late – I had hoped to have it out before Christmas – but at least I made it within January 01 2010 … have a good one!

Getting to the Point

This blog post is part of a series on Web Application Development with Ontopia.

  1. Part 1: Installation & Requirements
  2. Part 2: Creating the Database
  3. Part 3: Creating the JSPs

In Part 2 of this series on building web applications with Ontopia we had a look at how to set up an application’s domain model using Ontopoly.

This post discusses how to go about building a custom web interface to present the data.
Read the full post »

5 Comments by Trond on January 1, 2010
filed in Ontopia, Topic Maps, Web Development
tagged , , , ,

Web Application Development with Ontopia – 2. Creating the Database

Intro

This blog post is part of a series on Web Application Development with Ontopia.

  1. Part 1: Installation & Requirements
  2. Part 2: Creating the Database
  3. Part 3: Creating the JSPs

In part 1, we looked at how to set up Ontopia. We also described the application that we intend to build (a blog) and what we need to develop in order to achieve our goal.

This time we’ll look at how to set up the “database schema” and create new blog posts by using Ontopia’s web interface. The resulting topic map can be browsed here.

Read the full post »

4 Comments by Trond on December 4, 2009
filed in Ontopia, Topic Maps, Web Development
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Web Application Development with Ontopia – 1. Installation & Requirements

Introduction

Ontopia is an Open Source application that lets you create, manipulate and navigate information represented in topic maps. It’s also a toolbox for building all sorts of applications. Among the advantages of topic maps driven applications are enhanced navigation and search capabilities.

Ever since Ontopia went Open Source earlier this year, I’ve wanted to give an example of how easy it is to build a web application on top of it.

Through the next couple of blog posts, I’ll try to show exactly how easy this is – and I promise to leave out the unnecessary talk (wont discuss Topic Maps, for instance).

First I’ll “reveal” how to set up and start Ontopia. As this requires very little typing on my part, I’ll quickly move on to discuss what our goal is. Then we’ll have a look at the required data model, before pointing out the kinds of views that our application needs to support — and how to lay this out. Afterwards, we create the limited amount of code needed to get everything up and running. Last, we deploy.

All code will be available for download :)
Read the full post »

5 Comments by Trond on November 21, 2009
filed in Ontopia, Topic Maps, Web Development
tagged , , , ,

Berners-Lee excited about data.gov and the rise of the Semantic Web

No Comments by Trond on October 16, 2009
filed in Semantic Web

DC-X

Google Alerts recently notified me of Digital Collection, a German supplier of software for managing and research of digital information, which has created a topic maps based tool for news monitoring, research, archiving, workflows and now content creation called DC-X.

From the company’s blog entry:

The benefits of treating thesaurus and list terms as topics in a topic map:

  • Built-in support for multiple names, which we’re using to store translations for terms: All lists and thesauri can now be multi-lingual.
  • Class/instance relationship between terms; the “City” list is itself a topic, “Hamburg” and “Oslo” are instances of the “City” topic. This way an unlimited number of lists or thesauri can co-exist. Terms can even belong to multiple lists.
  • Arbitrary relations between terms: A thesaurus hierarchy is modeled using associations like “broader/narrower” or “synonym/preferred term”. Geographic hierarchies can use “part/whole” associations.
  • External identifier URIs can be specified for any term, so metadata can be mapped to metadata of other software using RDF, or anything else that points to the same URI.
  • Custom metadata can be attached to any term. We’ll use this for thesaurus “scope notes”, geo coordinates for cities etc.

They also mention that it is implemented based on XTM, why they chose not to use RDF, how the tool can be used, as well as plans for implementing a topic map browser and editor.

Alexander Johannesen’s Event Model Ontology

While blogging I might as well be the first one (?) to link to Alexander Johannesen’s “Missing ontological serinity in the world of software systems architecture” and “What event model ontology?” :)

No Comments by Trond on September 14, 2009
filed in Tools, Topic Maps

Shakespeare Topic Map

Back when I was in the university I took an undergraduate subject called Web programming. As part of that class, each student had to build a web site presenting the Shakespeare plays in a given format. The source was a bunch of XML documents.

Building the site using PHP and SAX parsing was fun enough at the time, but even though the XTM 1.0 specification mentions #play, #shakespeare and #written-by, I can’t recall ever seeing a topic map enabled site of the Shakespeare plays.

I therefore thought that it’d be fun to transform the Shakespeare XMLs into a topic map and publish it through a web site built on top of Ontopia.

I’m just putting the front end together piece by piece (15 mins here and 15 mins there :/ – currently not very usable).

The current (draft) version of the topic map is available for export (~23 MB LTM, ~133 MB XTM 2.0). This can also be browsed with Omnigator. If you observe any major flaws, feel free to leave a comment below :)

No Comments by Trond on September 2, 2009
filed in Ontopia, Topic Maps
tagged , , , ,
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