SKOS Browser

The latest release of my pet project, the Sesame 2 Windows Client (SWC), has a nice little feature that I though was worth sharing with you: a SKOS hierarchy browser.

Many ontology editors and viewers have the option of showing a class hierarchy but to my surprise I found very few tools that could display a SKOS broader/narrower hierarchy. So I hacked one together and put it in this client.

Add your SKOS thesaurus to a Sesame Repository, point the SWC at it, go to the "Browse Hierarchy" tab and choose "SKOS Hierarchy".

For now you can only click around in the hierarchy, you can not follow cross-taxonomical links or do any editing.

Sesame 2 Desktop Client

I recently needed a programming excercise in creating a Windows graphical user interface, and decided to create a simple Sesame 2 client. This has turned out to become quite a useful little tool so I've decided to make it available open source.

The Sesame 2 desktop client is a windows (.Net) application that can communicate with a (remote) Sesame 2 server, perform queries, add/remove data, and so on. It is somewhat similar to the Sesame Workbench application, but it has a couple of nice user-friendly options (such as implicit adding of namespace declarations to your queries, dynamic sorting of the query result, etc).

You can download it from sourceforge. Give it a spin, tell me what you think, suggestions most welcome!

Of and of course my thanks to the dotSesame people, whose work I've gratefully reused in this tool.

Sesame 2.0 final released (while you weren't looking...)

While everybody was busy stocking food and drink, the Sesame developers apparently have been at it in overdrive, managing to release the final release of Sesame 2.0 just in time for Christmas. From the openRDF.org announcement:

"Thanks to an overwhelming number of people that have tested the previous release candidates and reported any issues that surfaced, we can now proudly present Sesame, version 2.0!

After the second release candidate, only one serious issue was reported and fixed. We found and fixed some minor, non-critical issues ourselves and made some small improvements here and there, mostly related to HTTP communication and OpenRDF Workbench. All in all, we think the code is now sufficiently tested to call it 2.0-final.

The development focus will now shift to performance and scalability improvements. An RDBMS-based Sail implementation is currently under development and the first results look very promising. The performance of the native- and memory stores will also be improved. As there hasn't been put a lot of effort into this so far, we expect to achieve good results here."

I just want to take the opportunity to congratulate the people at Aduna with this important milestone! Great job, and thanks!