Ulisses
- A Topic Maps driven Conceptual Navigator
In order to browse an ontology, specified with Topic Maps, we should
see it as a graph, where nodes represent concepts (topics), and edges represent links to
physical information resources (occurrences) or to other concepts (associations). So, using the graph
it is obvious how to create a website for navigation (with a generic web browser): one web page
for each concept (not only the name, but all its characteristics) associated with outgoing edges,
each one implemented as a link to another web page. So, when a link is chosen a similar page is
displayed showing another concept or an information record.
The main idea about navigation can be described as: when the view are
positioned at a certain concept the navigation framework shows a particular concept, the
resources connected, and all the concepts related to it; if another concept is chosen, the position
changes to that concept and the view will change accordingly; if the choose is one of the resources
the system will show that resource view.
As the other 2 tools (Oveia and XTche),
Ulisses
-- a conceptual browser -- is a generic processor
that can be used outside Metamorphosis. It supports conceptual navigation over
XTM files and OntologyDB databases. Ulisses allows the navigation over topic maps generated by tools (like
Oveia) or by hand. In addiction, these sources can be previously checked for semantic
correctness (according to a validation with
XTche) or not.
In terms of implementation we wanted web browsers to be our
navigators, as can be seen in figure
above. This way all the views discussed above would be
HTML pages.
So, when the source is a XTM file, this navigational component is just
implemented as a set of XML transformations; when the source is
OntologyDB, appropriate
SQL-based tools are used to navigate over it. |