Graphologi beta release update

As it is just over a month since we released the Graphologi beta we thought it would be a good time to give you a quick update on how things are progressing. Our focus has mostly been on testing, which is going well, but based on the feedback we have received and our own experiences we have also added some new enhancements.

The first enhancment is TSV (tab separated value) and CSV (comma separated value) import support. The TSV import mirrors the existing TSV export within Graphologi. This is the first iteration of support for spreadsheet-like data and further enhancements will be made in future releases.

If you have spreadsheet data that you would want to import and are able to share that with us we would love to see it to help us shape the features our import needs to provide.

The second enhancement is the addition of what we call 'free-floating items'. Due to the nature of SKOS both concepts and SKOS-XL labels can exist without actually being in a concept scheme (where the association to a concept scheme is via the inScheme property). These 'free-floating' items can exist within a Graphologi project and can be viewed (and deleted if no longer required) in the new view that has been added. Free-floating items can be 'discovered' like any other concepts or labels and used within a concept scheme as required.

As well as improving the ability for a user to manage these items it can also be used as a store of concepts or labels that a user wants to remove from one scheme for potential later inclusion into another. This can be very useful for data cleaning exercises. We would be really interested to get your thoughts on this feature.

Other areas that have seen dramatic improvement are importing of data into a project where the data contains a very large number of concept schemes and exporting of TSV, which is now far more responsive.

Underpinning Graphologi is GrafSync - our collaborative RDF platform. There have also been many improvements made to GrafSync over the past few weeks, especially around deletion of resources. These improvements don't really surface themselves in any visible way - they just quietly contribute to powering a great user experience in the applications sitting on top of GrafSync.

We are in a pattern of regularly updating the beta and will continue to do so as we work though what is now a rapidly diminishing list of tasks for our production release.

As always, our mission is to provide standards compliant, easy to use applications with a great user experience and so further feedback and suggestions in this regard, or on any other aspect of Graphologi, are very welcome.

You can sign up to use the beta at https://graphologi.graphifi.com.

A couple of relevant references from the SKOS specification that relate to the free-floating functionality are:

4.6.1 Closed vs Open Systems
https://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/#L1101

4.6.4 Scheme Containment and Semantic Relations
https://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/#L2577