Dear Vocbenchers,

After almost seven months, a new version of VocBench (2.2) has been released.

We had so many features being developed in parallel, that one month ago we decided to consolidate a few of them and freeze the others for a while, so to have a first release 2.2 and then be able to put the remaining ones on the (hopefully shorter to be delivered) 2.3.

Here’s the change log:

·         An important change in ST: moved to the karaf OSGi container. Just run it through the bin/st_server_run batch/bash file. The new ST is totally compatible with the same data folder (SemanticTurkeyData) of the previous Semantic Turkey , so no need to update/change the existing data.

·         ST Instance Manager: no more need to pass an ST connection URL (which was rather annoying to be copied and pasted from the installation instructions). The static part of the connection URL is hardcoded in the system and  is always paired (and updated) with the ST version being used by the current VB, while the dynamic part can be defined only in terms of port and host. Also, through the ST instance manger, users can define multiple ST installations in terms of the sole baseURL and port and then just invoke them when defining a new project. A default ST configuration is already stored in the system, and corresponds to the default settings of ST (localhost, 1979).

·         Running more projects on the same ST instance: from ST 0.10 (paired with VB2.2), it is now possible to manage more projects in parallel with the same ST instance (technical details on the ST site: http://semanticturkey.uniroma2.it). Through the ST instance manager, it is possible to associate and host different projects on ST instances, though this is no more necessary.

·         User experience: New features/improvements:

o    A much requested feature: user-customizable entity id-generator (e.g. the way the name of concepts, xlabels etc.. is generated can be customized)

o    Validation for move/link/unlink actions

o    downloadable SPARQL results

o    scheme management: now possible to edit lexicalizations for schemes as well

o    Interface for checking and repairing dangling concepts (many more integrity constraint validations to come in 2.3!)

·         bug fix:

o    Fixed locking of visitor only mode. In visitor mode, user can login as Adminstrator to get out of visitor mode.

o    In ST: no more projects deleted due to a lost connection to a remote repository

o    RDF Export not working

o    Removed the user/grojup management capability from the Publisher. Note this is not removed from existing installation

·         New experimental resource view. To test it: login as administrator, you will see new button on top of concept tree. Select any concept and click "<s-p-o>" button near the visualization button. It will popup the resource view.

·         Developers only: Context injectable services: now services address objects injected through an extensible "context": the context currently includes the: read and write graph(s) and the project to be considered (following the multi-project management enabled in this version)

The binary download is available as usual on the download page: https://bitbucket.org/art-uniroma2/vocbench/downloads. Check the 2.2 download: https://bitbucket.org/art-uniroma2/vocbench/downloads/VOCBENCH_2.2.zip

Some anticipations for VB2.3 (some of the features below could shift to VB2.4)

·         Spreadsheet import: a powerful yet simple tool, based on Sheet2RDF (http://art.uniroma2.it/sheet2rdf/) and CODA (http://art.uniroma2.it/coda/), built inside VB!

·         Multiproject management: explicit management of multiple open projects and their dependencies and mutual visibility.

·         Low Level Project Management from UI (not only project creation/deletion, but also modifying its inner variables)

·         Several ICV (Integrity Constraint Validation) utilities

·         Data fixing/lifting utilities

·         Improved resource view (probably 2.4)

·         Basic support for alignment (probably 2.4)

…and as usual, a big thank to this rising user community as a whole for the continuous positive and encouraging feedback we receive!

The VocBench team