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