ANN: VocBench 2.3 released

Dear all

 

*** apologies for cross-posting ***

 

Version 2.3 of VocBench has been released today, and is available here:
http://vocbench.uniroma2.it/downloads/

 

----

For those new to VocBench.

 

VocBench is a web-based, multilingual, editing and workflow tool that
manages thesauri, authority lists and glossaries using SKOS-XL. Designed to
meet the needs of Semantic Web and Linked Data environments, VocBench
provides tools and functionalities that facilitate both collaborative
editing and multilingual terminology development. It also includes
administration and group management features that permit flexible roles for
maintenance, validation and publication.

 

VocBench 2 is being developed in the context of a collaboration between the
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
[http://www.fao.org/] and the ART Group of the University of Rome 'Tor
Vergata' [http://art.uniroma2.it/]

 

Interested people can learn more about VocBench by visiting its project
site: http://vocbench.uniroma2.it/

and by subscribing to its user/developer discussion groups:
http://vocbench.uniroma2.it/support/ 

----

 

As you can see from the changelog below, we have stuffed quite a few new
features/improvements in this release. This also forced us to postpone a few
interesting-though-not-primary objectives to the next versions. The primary
objectives for this version were:

-          to offer a few utilities for dealing with data imported from
pre-existing vocabularies and for exporting managed datasets to plain SKOS

-          to cover the full range of RDF properties (by adding more tabs,
while keeping the usual ones for the most commonly used properties) 

-          to introduce support for alignment.

 

Changelog:

 

                . Introduced support for Alignment (in a dedicated tab).
Alignments can be set either by:

                               o Manually specifying the URI of the aligned
concept 

                               o Browsing other thesauri hosted in the same
VB instance, and searching the concepts to match. Free-text search is
initially powered by the labels of the concept to be mapped, though may be
freely edited by the user.

                . Extended support for all RDF properties

                               o Added more tabs for: Alignment, Annotation
(all annotation properties not covered by other tabs), Other (plain RDF
properties)

                               o Extended relationship tab: it now covers
all OWL object properties; the add-value form now suggests only
subproperties of skos:related, but an option allows to select all
owl:ObjectProperties

                               o Extended datatype tab: it now covers all
OWL datatype properties; the add-value form now suggests only properties
with domain skos:Concept, but an option allows to select all
owl:DatatypeProperties

                               o Added Plain-RDF properties tree view

                               o Rearranged tab-ordering based on most
important/mostly used tabs

                               o Added an option for filtering the tabs
which are being shown

                . Added dedicated forms for all XmlSchema Definition
datatypes (xsd:date, xsd:datetime, xsd:duration etc.)

                . Refactoring

                               o Added URI-renaming

                               o Added global baseuri/namespace refactoring
(beware: recent changes and validation are not refactored as well, so
perform it with a clean validation table!)

                . Menu revision

                               o Added a "Global Data Management" menu,
containing data management functionalities working at project-scale

                               o Moved existing project-scale data
management functionalities from the blue-stripe-header menu and from the
Administrator menu to the new "Global Data Management"

                . Data-lifting (Global Data Management\Refactor)

                               o Added mass data-refactoring from SKOS to
SKOS-XL (useful after loading a SKOS thesaurus)

                               o Added mass data-refactoring for reifying
skos:definitions (from plain literals to RDF resources, as normally managed
in VB)

                . Integrity Constraint Validation (ICV)

                               o Added one single ICV for checking dangling
concepts (more to come in VB2.4)

                . Import-Export

                               o Enabled export in all notable RDF
serialization formats

                               o Enabled forced selection of file format
when importing vocabularies. If not specified, it is guessed from the file
extension/MIME type as usual

                               o Enabled export to plain SKOS (skos core
labels) and with plain skos:definitions. Options allow to retain the
original reified labels/definitions together with the plain ones, or to
remove them from the export

                . Enabled search-by-URI

                . Per-Project reconfigurable ID generators (from ST 0.11,
see: http://vocbench.uniroma2.it/documentation/adv_users.jsf)

                . Scheme Management: the selected scheme is now local to
each user, and must be defined at each session. The administrator may
define, per project, the scheme which will be selected by default at the
start of each session.

                . Minor Improvements

                               o Minor terminological Improvements to the UI

                               o Allow users to cancel a language request

                               o Display number of entries per page in the
recent changes page

                               o after checking "Show inferred and explicit"
on the concept description area, the shown tab is not switched to the
"Terms" tab but remains on the currently selected one

                . Bug Fixes

                               o SPARQL results were sometimes (in case of
null values) not properly aligned with the column headers: fixed

                               o "Add and repeat" button in concept creation
now properly allows to create another concept, instead of a new term for the
same concept

 

 

And here follows the plan for 2.4 (maybe 2.5 for some of the features below)
:

 

. A totally revamped data presentation layer for concepts, schemes etc. also
able to browse linked open data 

. Multiproject management: explicit management of multiple open projects and
their dependencies and mutual visibility (currently functionalities
accessing other projects, such as the alignment tab, can currently access
all the projects open in VB).

. Several ICV points (currently only a fixer fo dangling concepts is
available). Note that many ICV points are already available in the Firefox
interface for the same version of Semantic Turkey used by VB2.3 (Semantic
Turkey 0.11, see: http://semanticturkey.uniroma2.it/)

. Shet2RDF porting for advanced Excel import/export (currently available as
an extension for Semantic Turkey, see: http://art.uniroma2.it/sheet2rdf/)

. Extension point for ID generators: third-party developers will be able to
add new implementations (note that the currently configurable ID generator
introduced in VB2.3 will be still available as the default implementation
for this extension point)

. Under-the-hood Project Management from UI (not only project
creation/deletion, but also modifying its inner variables) 

. Better user requests management for the administrator

 

 

For developers willing to recompile the project, consider that there are a
few dependencies on other projects managed by us:

-          semantic-turkey (0.11):
http://semanticturkey.uniroma2.it/
https://bitbucket.org/art-uniroma2/semantic-turkey        

o   coda (1.1):         http://art.uniroma2.it/coda/
https://bitbucket.org/art-uniroma2/coda          

o   owlart (2.3):      http://art.uniroma2.it/owlart/
https://bitbucket.org/art-uniroma2/owlart/

o   owlart-sesame2 (1.3):  https://bitbucket.org/art-uniroma2/owlart-sesame2


 

They are not still on Maven but will be committed soon. 

While still not on Maven, it will be necessary to download and compile also
the source code of the above projects. 

All of the above reported versions have been tagged on their respective GIT
repositories.

 

 

Cheers,

 

The VocBench team

 

http://art.uniroma2.it/ 

http://aims.fao.org/ 

Received on Thursday, 23 April 2015 12:31:43 UTC