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Trond Pettersen on Web Development and Topic Maps

Open for Web Development Opportunities in the US.

Category: Ontopia

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 article »

4 Comments by Trond on January 1, 2010
filed in Ontopia, Topic Maps, Web Development
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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 article »

2 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 :)
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4 Comments by Trond on November 21, 2009
filed in Ontopia, Topic Maps, Web Development
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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
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