[Fsf-friends] Release of GNOWSYS Version 0.4

[Nagarjuna G.]

Release notes for GNOWSYS version 0.4.

GNOWSYS: Gnowledge Networking and Organizing System. Useful for
knowledge/content management, semantic web, building ontologies,
building portal sites, link management etc.  Learn more about it from
http://www.gnowledge.org.

In this version of GNOWSYS we have added a number of new modules.  The
core GNOWSYS engine of the earlier releases has been improved with
better catalogue support.

1. Changes to GNOWSYS Core Semantic Engine:

Amongst the main improvements to the core engine over GNOWSYS version
0.3 is that now the catalog support has been improved.  All the Object
Types, Objects, Association Types, and Associations entries are
catalogued.  Facet Types and Occurrence Types are yet to be fully
supported by Catalog.  This feature can be effectively used for large
gnowledge bases, since ZOPE catalog increases the response time.  In
future releases Facet Types and Occurrence Types will also be
catalogued.

In GNOWSYS 0.4 the User Interface has also been changed.  Amongst
improvements to user interface. The layout of the index_html for an
Object and an Object Types has been changed.  We tried to get all the
metadata of the objects visible.  This may make the system a little
slow, but useful for the users to know how to query for the most
useful metadata of the objects.  Users can modify all of this since we
copy the entire template as dtml files in the instance.

In association types now we have new associaton type called as rigid
associations.  By rigid association we mean: when an object is
installed as an instance of an object type, which is defined as a role
in a rigid association type, then the association will be
automatically made.  This works more like an RDBMS relation between
two tables. 

Apart from these changes there are numerous other small changes and
bug fixes.

2. New modules in GNOWSYS.

In this release a number of new modules have been added, they are
as follows.

	1. Functional Representation (Execute)
	2. Graphical Representation (Draw Maps)
	3. Import Export (XML Data Exchange, TopicMaps (XTM))
	4. Publishing Module (Publish)

Modules 2 and 4 may not work in non-UNIX operating systems without lot
of tweaking.  Most of this is due to the use of external programs like
TeX and MetaPost.  In future we will make this truly interoperable.

3. In future we will have:

    - authentication module (multi-user, role
        based with integration with the ObjectType Members), 

    - work-flow (keeping track of objects and status), 

    - RDF and OIL support for data exchange to make it ready for
        semantic web community.

    - XUL GUI for editing GNOWSYS sites effortlessly from
	  Mozilla/Netscape and using a GTK/QT client.

    - UTF-8 support

    - skins or at least a style sheet

    - optimizing for speed

    - and improving all the above and continueing to fix bugs.

Examples illustrating the use of GNOWSYS will be made and linked from
the project website: http://www.gnowledge.org

Happy gnowing!

GNOWSYS TEAM
Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education


Nagarjuna
-- 
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nagarjun at hbcse tifr res in.		      http://www.gnowledge.org/
I support Public Library of Science	      http://www.plos.org/