AIMS

VocBench 2.3 released!

Dear VoBenchers,

A few hours after the previous post about the new vocbench publication, we are happy to inform you that a new release of VocBench is out there!

VocBench 2.3 is available at its usual download page: http://vocbench.uniroma2.it/downloads/

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:

  1. to offer a few utilities for dealing with data imported from pre-existing vocabularies and for exporting managed datasets to plain SKOS
  2. to cover the full range of RDF properties (by adding more tabs, while keeping the usual ones for the most commonly used properties)
  3. to introduce support for alignment.

Changelog:

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

Manually specifying the URI of the aligned concept,

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

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

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

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,

Added Plain-RDF properties tree view,

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

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

Added URI-renaming,  

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

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

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) ,
  •  
  • Added mass data-refactoring from SKOS to SKOS-XL (useful after loading a SKOS thesaurus),
  • Added mass data-refactoring for reifying skos:definitions (from plain literals to RDF resources, as normally managed in VB)
  •  
  • Integrity Constraint Validation (ICV)

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

  • Import-Export

Enabled export in all notable RDF serialization formats
Enabled forced selection of file format when importing vocabularies. If not specified, it is guessed from the file extension/MIME type as usual
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

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

Minor terminological Improvements to the UI
Allow users to cancel a language request
Display number of entries per page in the recent changes page
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

SPARQL results were sometimes (in case of null values) not properly aligned with the column headers: fixed
"Add and repeat" button in concept creation now properly allows to create another concept, instead of a new term for the same concept

Future Release Plan

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

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

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

Visit VocBench For Developers and Home page

 

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