As our new APIs slowly become stable it is time to announce some of the new features. OntoWiki 1.0 will have an enhanced plug-in architecture and a lot of APIs that allow you to customize the user interface. In addition to plug-ins which have been around for some time, there are three new extension types:
- Components
- Modules
- Wrapper
In short, components are pluggable controllers, modules are those little boxes OntoWiki has been using for some time now and wrapper are extension for extracting triples from external sources and importing them into your knowledge base.
One wrapper that ships with OntoWiki can e. g. load triples from Linked Data-enabled endpoints like Sindice or DBpedia. Among others, this feature is demonstrated in the new screencast. But the wrapper is only a part of OntoWiki’s new Linked Data enhancements. A plug-in publishes resources as linked data, provided their URI shares the prefix with the domain the respective OntoWiki installation runs under and the named graph is readable.
Besides extensibility, improvements in performance was one of the key goals for OntoWiki 1.0. Thus, it was only natural to make OntoWiki work with Virtuoso, one of the fastest RDF triple stores around. Besides Virtuoso, MySQL is still supported as well. It underwent, however, serious refactoring and is now based around ZendDb instead of ADOdb as its abstraction layer.
A preliminary version (OntoWiki 0.9) will be released in the coming weeks. It is based on the 1.0 code base but doesn’t contain all the features we’d like to include in 1.0.
