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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.

 

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