Metamorphosis'
Architecture
The main idea behind Metamorphosis is to integrate
the specification of conceptual networks or
ontologies, with their storage and navigation, as well as, their
automatic extraction and validation.
Just to give a flavor of the system, a Metamorphosis'
application can be described with an example:
suppose that an information system composed of several resources like
XML documents, relational databases, and PDF
documents, must be accessible through the Web. At the
first try it is important to built a complete index of all data
items. That index is huge and web browsers is
not capable of displaying it. It is possible to fractionate this
information in a conceptual way. Here is the
point where it will start discussing the organization of this
information system and here it is introduced \textit{Metamorphosis}.
It is not need to change anything in these
resources; an ontology for this information system must be created
that represent the desired domain.
One of the first Metamorphosis' applications was the
production of site maps; another of our former
concerns was the contents publishing in the context of e-learning.
Metamorphosis can be also used to test some
functionalities of a dynamic web system because
it creates, in a fast way, a web interface that interacts directly
with data sources.
Metamorphosis takes as input:
Information resources: composed of one or more data sources:
XML documents, web pages, databases, ...
Metamorphosis does not interfere with any of it, it
will only use part of the information to build the semantic
network;
XML Specifications: the description of data sources (written in
XSDS -- XML Specification for DataSources);
the description of the ontology (written in
XS4TM -- XML Specification for Topic Maps); and the description
of the constraints to be complied by topic map
instance (written in XTCHE -- Topic Maps
Schema and Constraint Language).
and generates as output:
Conceptual Website: The final generated website through which
it is possible to navigate through the information system driven by concepts organized
in a semantic network.
Metamorphosis Architecture
Figure above shows Metamorphosis' architecture that came up from the
principles underlying our proposal. This architecture is composed of:
(1) Oveia: The processor that builds topic maps. Its
core is a processor that extracts the topics instances from the information resources and
builds a topic map. It reads and processes the XSDS and XS4TM specifications.
(2) Generated topic map: The topic map automatically generated
by Oveia stored as
an XTM file or alternatively a relational database.
(3) XTche: The processor that consumes the previous
XTM file and verifies the topic map according to a set of constraints defined in XTCHE language.
(4) Valid topic map: The previous topic map automatically
validated by XTche.
(5) Ulisses: The processor that takes a topic map and
produces a whole semantic website, a set of web pages where it is possible to navigate through
structural or syntactic links as well as through a network of concepts. |