GrafSync platform Alpha 2 release

Back in December we announced the Alpha 1 release of our GrafSync platform and the Vocabulary Manager and Ontology Manager applications built using that platform.

GrafSyncis a collaborative RDF editing platform allowing users to see each others updates as they are made. It permits applications to be built on top of its core functionality by providing collaboration, project and user management features as well as APIs and client libraries.

We are pleased to follow this up by releasing Alpha 2. This release moves things forward considerably for the GrafSync platform and the applications as well, especially in terms of design and stability. We share a few of the new features and give some examples below.

The GrafSync design has now been fully applied across the platform and applications. As an example, the screenshot below shows the UNESCO thesaurus using this design.

Some of the features that we have added in this release are:

• The ability to select a viewing language, which can help highlight missing labels for concepts
• Full change history for both the Vocabulary Manager and Ontology Manager.
• Enhanced cross scheme concept use, allowing improved discovery and use of concepts across concept schemes within a project.

You can see the viewing language feature in action below, where the image shows a concept from the Agrovoc taxonomy being viewed in Spanish. Missing Spanish information is highlighted in orange.

We also highlight some of GrafSync’s features with some data that Ian Piper of Tellura Semanticshas kindly allowed us to use.

In the first screenshot below you can see that we have imported the data and that it consists of three taxonomies.

The second screenshot shows a property from Ian’s ontology, with various properties being used such as inverseOf, Domain and Range.

The third screenshot shows some of the ontology properties being used to enhance a concept in the country information taxonomy. Within Vocabulary Manager it is possible to associate a Vocabulary Manager project with one or more Ontology Manager projects and selectively pick classes and properties to expose for use. Properties respect domain and range values when being displayed and when a user populates values.

Our goal is very much to provide easy to use software that provides taxonomists with the tooling they need, that is standards compliant and has a comprehensive set of features from day one. With SKOS, SKOS-XL and OWL support all in place hopefully we are well on the way to providing that.

We are very keen to get more users trying out the system - feedback is essential for us to tune the applications. If you are interested in using the Vocabulary and Ontology Manager applications please get in touch.

Our next step will now be working towards a beta release where we finalise functionality. So look out for more soon.