Ontopia

What’s new - Ontopia 1.x

This document describes what has changed in Ontopia between releases, both at a higher level, and in more detail.

5.3.0 2013-08-01

Changes from 1.4.1 to 1.4.2

This release is purely a bug fix release.

Omnigator

We have fixed the following bugs in the Omnigator:

  • Bug #661: Associations where current topic plays multiple roles displayed incorrectly.

Navigator Framework

The following bugs have been fixed in the Navigator Framework:

  • Bug #663: Setup servlets did not work with Tomcat 4.1 and shared repositories.
  • Bug #659: Role players were disregarded when sorting association roles.
  • Bug #658: ContextTag caching caused problems in Oracle 9i Application Server and WebLogic.

Topic Map Engine

The following bugs have been fixed in the Topic Map Engine:

  • Bug #657: Base names sometimes lost when merging topics.
  • Bug #664: File URLs were normalized incorrectly.
  • Bug #660: In XTM, having a topicRef and a subjectIndicatorRef to the same URI within the subjectIdentity element caused an exception.

In addition, NameIndexIF has now been made auto-updating.

Query Engine

The following bugs have been fixed in the Query Engine:

  • Bug #655: Queries failed on unary associations.
  • Bug #662: Bug(s) in merging of results from inference rules.

Changes from 1.4 to 1.4.1

This release is a bug fix release, released primarily to fix some embarrassing problems in the Omnigator. There are bug fixes in other parts of the OKS as well, however. The LTM Emacs mode is now distributed with the OKS, as is one additional topic map: support-kb.ltm.

Omnigator

We are now bundling Tomcat 4.1.18 with the Omnigator, rather than 4.0.6, which we used for 1.4. The front page has been cleaned up a little, and a link to a new “Index of Individuals”, showing all the topics that are not typing topics, has been added to the topic map page. In addition, we have fixed the following bugs:

  • Bug #656: Class hierarchy loops caused Omnigator to freeze.
  • Bug #648: Couldn’t display topic maps when the superclass-subclass topic (with role topics) was defined, but there were no associations of that type.
  • Bug #578: Refreshing application configuration failed to work for some configuration settings.

Navigator Framework

The following bugs have been fixed in the Navigator Framework:

  • Bug #605: Improved error message when tm:associated gets input that does not only consist of topics.
  • Bug #634: template:put did not call BodyContent.clearBody().

In addition the documentation has been improved in places.

Topic Map Engine

The following bugs have been fixed in the Topic Map Engine:

  • Bug #654: Exporter assigns duplicate IDs.
  • Bug #598: NullPointerException when loading topic map.

In addition the documentation has been improved in places.

Query Engine

The following bugs have been fixed in the Query Engine:

  • Bug #643: Queries of the form related($A : term, $A : term) did not work.
  • Bug #593: Selecting the same variable twice crashed rather than provide a proper error message.
  • Bug #615: Order by in tolog did not use sort names.

In addition the documentation has been improved in places.

Changes from 1.3.4 to 1.4

This release adds several major new features to the OKS, the most important of which are:

  • A beta version of the Web Editor Framework,
  • Improvements to the Navigator Framework to make it more powerful and easier to use,
  • An implementation of tolog designed for use with the RDBMS backend, and

Each of these are described in more detail below. In addition, this version has a large number of bug fixes, as well as numerous minor improvements to the documentation.

Omnigator

A plug-in for providing feedback to Ontopia has been added to the Omnigator, there are now links to the topics that represent role types from the pages about association types, subject addresses are being displayed, and it is now distributed with Tomcat 4.1. The following bugs have been fixed:

  • Bug #601: The Tomcat batch scripts set environment variables incorrectly on Windows in some cases.
  • Bug #618: Reloading unloaded topic maps on the Manage page caused an error.
  • Bug #584: Topics were sorted by base name rather than sort name.

Navigator Framework

The most important changes to the Navigator Framework functionality are:

  • The logic:if tag can now be used inside logic:set since it will now pass values produced in the then/else branches upwards. This makes it possible to write much more powerful recursive functions.
  • The tm:tolog tag now has an attribute select for producing a collection of values rather than a map.
  • The logic:set tag will now produce an empty collection if it has no content, thus making it easier to produce empty collections.
  • The tm:associated tag has a new attribute produce, which can be used to tell it to produce associations rather than topics.
  • The tm:subjectAddress tag has been added.

In addition, a number of bugs have been fixed in the Navigator Framework:

  • Bug #634: A bug in the ontojsp JSP tag interpreter made functions work poorly in Tomcat 4.1.
  • Bug #624: The tm:name tag would crash if given the wrong kind of collection in its basenameScope attribute.
  • Bug #583: The Navigator Framework did not work correctly in the BEA WebLogic application server.
  • Bug #575: The tm:name tag produced collections containing null when used on a topic which had no name. This would cause problems for other tags.

Topic Map Engine

The following change has been made to the topic map engine:

  • The SubjectUtils class has been deprecated since it was badly broken (it did not distinguish between subject addresses and subject indicators), and because it did not perform any useful function.

The only changes to the topic map engine in this release are the following bug fixes:

  • Bug #535: The SubjectIdentityDecider did not distinguish subject addresses from subject identifiers. Nor did any of the many classes that used it.
  • Bug #623: The LTM parser provided poor error messages when the ID of the topic map collided with that of a topic.
  • Bug #614: The LTM parser would loop forever if presented with an LTM file which had an internal occurrence that was not terminated with ]].
  • Bug #582: The XTM importer ignored the XML namespace of elements and used the XML 1.0 element type name to look for XTM elements. Now accepts any element in the XTM namespace.
  • Bug #522: In XTM documents containing more than one topic map references to the same external document from multiple topic maps will only be loaded for the first topic map.
  • Bug #538: A mistake in the test code for the module encrypter caused the test suite to fail on Windows due to differences in line endings.

The Schema Tools

In this version a number of problems in the documentation of the OSL schema language have been fixed, and some bugs in the tools themselves have been fixed.

  • Bug #557: When a topic was an instance of two different classes the validator would not merge the constraints on the two classes correctly.
  • Bug #629: The OSL importer did not handle superclass references to classes defined further down in the file.
  • Bug #614: The LTM parser would loop forever if presented with an LTM file which had an internal occurrence that was not terminated with ]].
  • Bug #582: The XTM importer ignored the XML namespace of elements and used the XML 1.0 element type name to look for XTM elements. Now accepts any element in the XTM namespace.
  • Bug #522: In XTM documents containing more than one topic map references to the same external document from multiple topic maps will only be loaded for the first topic map.

The Query Engine

A new implementation of the tolog query language designed especially for the RDBMS backend has been added. This implementation converts tolog queries directly to SQL queries, which are then executed by the RDBMS. This makes evaluation of tolog queries enormously much faster when running on the RDBMS backend.

The net.ontopia.topicmaps.query.utils.QueryUtils class has also been added to the API. Developers are recommended to use this class to create instances of the QueryProcessorIF interface, as this class will create different processors depending on what topic map implementation is used.

In addition, a method for loading rules from Java Reader objects has been added to the QueryProcessorIF.

The RDBMS Backend

The only changes to the RDBMS backend have been a tiny optimization of some queries, and a single bug fix:

  • Bug #627: In some cases constraints in the RDBMS schema would be violated when collection properties were modified.

Changes from 1.3.3 to 1.3.4

This release is primarily a bug fix release, though some optimizations have also been performed, and some APIs have been cleaned up. In addition, there are some minor improvements here and there.

Omnigator

A number of minor adjustments have been made in the Omnigator’s display. In addition, the free download now has an additional capability.

  • The number of objects in each list is now displayed together with the heading.
  • The association players now have their names selected using the current topic as a theme.
  • The scope of associations is now displayed using a mouse-over.
  • The name chosen for the title of the topic page now tries to use the topic types as themes when selecting a name to display.
  • The free download distribution of the Omnigator now includes the fulltext adminstration plug-in. This plug-in lets you create and delete fulltext indexes for topic maps.
  • The full-text plug-in ‘No index’ message is now a link to the full-text administration plug-in manage page.
  • The “fulltext-admin” plug-in directory has been renamed to “ftadmin”, because the Tomcat JSP compiler (Jasper) converts directory names to Java package names and hyphens are not allowed in package names.

Navigator Framework

The tag libraries have seen some internal changes, and a couple of usability improvements.

  • The tm:tolog tag now has a select attribute that allows it to produce a collection of topics rather than maps.
  • The logic:set tag has been changed, so that if empty it will still set the named variable, but set it to the empty collection. (In previous versions the variable was not set at all.)
  • The tag library implementation has been optimized, yielding some performance improvements.
  • The method net.ontopia.topicmaps.nav2.core.NavigatorApplicationIF.getUserStoreRegistry() has been added and replaces the now deprecated getStoreRegistry() and getTransactionUser() methods. This change renders the transaction user used by the navigator application transparent.
  • net.ontopia.topicmaps.nav2.core.NavigatorTagException and derived exception classes now support nested exceptions, i.e. the cause.
  • Added net.ontopia.topicmaps.nav2.impl.basic.AbstractFunction, which is a common base class for user defined taglib functions. See the logic:externalFunction in the taglib reference for more information.
  • Deprecated the following methods in net.ontopia.topicmaps.nav2.core.FunctionIF: getName(), getReturnVariableName(), and call(PageContext, TagSupport).
  • Added net.ontopia.topicmaps.nav2.core.FunctionIF.execute(PageContext, TagSupport), which now takes over the role of executing user defined functions. Existing functions will continue to work provided they subclass AbstractFunction.
  • Added net.ontopia.topicmaps.nav2.core.NavigatorPageIF.registerFunction(String, FunctionIF), which replaces the now deprecated registerFunction(FunctionIF) method.
  • Bug #560: First content node inside functions was ignored.

Topic Map Engine

The changes to the engine mainly consist in bug fixes, optimizations, and minor API improvements.

  • The URILocator(File) constructor was added to make it easy to create URI locators from File objects.
  • The StoreRegistry.isStoreOpen(Object txnuser, String refkey) method was added so that it was possible to figure out if a store for a reference key was open for the specified transaction user.
  • The UserStoreRegistry class was added to make it easier to use the StoreRegistry in situations where there was only a single transaction user.
  • The utility class NullResolvingExternalReferenceHandler was added, as a default reference handler that does not resolve any external references.
  • Added TopicMapStoreIF.delete(), which lets you delete a topic map from the store. Note that the topic map must be empty, ie. not contain any topics, associations, or facets, before it can be deleted.
  • Added net.ontopia.topicmaps.entry.UserStoreRegistry, a wrapper class for StoreRegistry instances and a single transaction user.
  • The scope processing code has been optimized.
  • Bug #545: An exception was thrown when an XTM URI didn’t not contain a fragment (“#”). This has now been fixed.
  • Bug #533: The tm-sources.xml now produces better error messages for certain errors.

Full-text Integration

  • The full-text integration has been upgraded to use Lucene 1.2 final. The Lucene change log is available here.

Query Engine

  • Added net.ontopia.topicmaps.query.core.QueryResultIF.close() which lets query results release its underlying resources.
  • Added net.ontopia.topicmaps.query.utils.QueryUtils.getQueryProcessor(TopicMapIF), which makes it possible to get a query processor optimized for the given topic map.

RDBMS Backend Connector

  • RDBMSTopicMapReference.delete() now delegates to RDBMSTopicMapStore.delete(), which allows TopicMapIF instances to be deleted if they contain no data.
  • The syntax of the URI locator returned by RDBMSTopicMapStore.getBaseAddress() was wrong. This has now been fixed. The correct syntax is ‘x-tm:rdbms:12345’, where 12345 is the id of the topic map.
  • Added net.ontopia.topicmaps.impl.rdbms.RDBMSSingleTopicMapSource, which lets you reference individual RDBMS topic maps.

Changes from 1.3.2 to 1.3.3

This release is almost purely a bugfix release. It corrects a bug in the test suite, as well as an important bug in the RDBMS backend. We recommend that RDBMS users upgrade. Other users need not bother.

Navigator Framework

The functionality has been extended/changed in the following ways:

  • The generation of topic map IDs in links is now improved. It no longer depends on the logic:context tag.
  • The getTopicMapById(Object txnuser, String topicmapId) method on NavigatorApplicationIF has been deprecated. It will eventually be removed.
  • The getTopicMapRefId method on NavigatorApplicationIF has been added.

Topic Map Engine

There has been one API change; a new constructor for the URILocator class has been added: URILocator(File file).

The following bugs were fixed:

  • Bug #538: A weakness in EncryptionWriter, an internal class used only for building releases, caused the test suite to fail on Windows and on platforms where the default encoding was not ISO 8859-1. This class has now been replaced by one which does not have this problem.
  • Some unreported problems with the importInto method in XTMTopicMapReader and LTMTopicMapReader have been fixed.

RDBMS Backend Connector

The following bugs have been fixed:

  • Bug #540: The positions of the two parameters to lookup by source locator were reversed in queries.xml, which caused all such lookups to fail with PostgreSQL databases. Subject address lookups had the same problem and failed with all databases. This is a serious bug, and has been fixed in this release. Upgrades are recommended.
  • Bug #539: The developer’s guide had some out-of-date code exaaples.

Changes from 1.3.1 to 1.3.2

Previous versions shipped with a built-in license key that would expire 90 days after the version was built. In version 1.3.2 this is different. The software comes with no default license key, and will not run before it gets one. Read section 3.2 of the install guide to see how the software finds its license key.

Omnigator

Some new features have been added, as listed below. Note also that the interpretation of XTM documents has changed, as described in Topic Map Engine.

  • If the topic map has a reifying topic with a description occurrence (using the Ontopia description PSI) that description is now displayed on the topic map start page.
  • The tolog plug-in now lets you specify inference rules.
  • The Omnigator now displays the source locators of topics at the bottom of the page.
  • The Omnigator now produces stable links to topics, by using the symbolic IDs from the source files instead of object IDs.
  • The Omnigator now displays its version number, build details, and expiry date on the welcome page.

Navigator Framework

The functionality has been extended/changed in the following ways:

  • The output:id tag has been added. This tag makes it possible for web applications to produce stable links. This is related to bug #515.

In addition, some reference diagrams have been added to the tag library documentation, to make it easier to see how to traverse topic map information using the tag libraries.

A number of bugs have also been fixed:

  • Bug #513: The output:treediagram tag did not use the user context filter when labelling nodes in the tree.
  • Bug #489: The tm:occurrences tag accepted illegal values in the type attribute.

Topic Map Engine

As part of the fix to bug #523 the behaviour of the XTM importer with respect to entities has changed. In earlier versions, one could refer from tm.xtm to the topic foo in the external entity tm.ent using #foo, but now it is necessary to use URIs of the form tm.ent#foo. Relative URIs inside tm.ent will now be resolved relative to the URI of that entity, rather than relative to the URI of the document entity as before. We realize that this may break existing documents, but the XML Base specification is very clear on what the correct behaviour is in this case.

Other improvements are:

  • The OntopiaRuntimeException now provides more information, which leads to better error messages in a number of situations.
  • The XTMContentHandler has been optimized somewhat, resulting in faster XTM imports. The exact speed-up depends on the topic map in question, but on average imports seem to be about 15% faster.
  • The engine (and the rest of the OKS) has been upgraded to the new log4j 1.2 release. This should have no impact on users in any way.

There have also been a number of API changes:

  • The TopicMapBuilderIF interface has two new methods for creating topics, which allow a single topic type or a collection of topic types to be added to the topic directly.
  • The net.ontopia.topicmaps.entry package has been considerably reworked and expanded, making it much more powerful and usable than it was before.
  • The DefaultTopicMapSource class now has methods for adding and removing topic map references. The TopicMapReferenceIF has a number of new methods added to it, making it considerably more powerful than it was before. The same applies to TopicMapSourceIF. The StoreFactoryReference and StoreRegistry classes and the TopicMapRepositoryIF interface have been added.
  • The TopicStringifiers utility class now has a method that lets the user specify desired base name and variant name scope.

The following bugs were fixed:

  • Bug #524: In some cases subject indicator merges when importing from XTM would result in broken topic maps.
  • Bug #516: Empty xml:base attributes caused XTM loading to fail.
  • Bug #457: When importing XTM topic maps, merged-in topic maps would add their source locators to that of the master topic map, which was wrong, and caused problems with reification.
  • Bug #511: Using scope on an occurrence or association in LTM would give a parse error if an association followed directly after. This was solved by increasing lookahead in the parser.
  • Bug #523: relative URIs inside XML entities in XTM documents are now resolved relative to the URI of the entity.
  • Bug #533: Bad error message when entering file as path in tm-sources.xml.
  • Bug #530: Bad error message from LTM parser when syntax name in #MERGEMAP not quoted.

Full-text Integration

The only change in this version is that the command-line LuceneIndexer tool now supports the use of x-tm:rdbms URIs to refer to topic maps stored in the RDBMS backend. This means it can be used to index RDBMS topic maps.

Query Engine

In this release, the only change was a bug fix:

  • Bug #476: Association predicates where the same role type was used more than once gave wrong results.

Schema Tools

The documentation of the player element type in OSL was extended somewhat. The only other change was a bug fix:

  • Bug #494: NullPointerException on undefined otherClasses.

RDBMS Backend Connector

Two new command-line utilities were added in this version: net.ontopia.topicmaps.cmdlineutils.rdbms.RDBMSImport and net.ontopia.topicmaps.cmdlineutils.rdbms.RDBMSExport. These allow users to import and export topic maps into and out of the RDBMS backend from the command-line.

A minor optimization of the lookup queries was made for the PostgreSQL RDBMS server.

Otherwise, the major change was the introduction of support for virtual collections. What this means is when calling say getTopics() on TopicMapIF the topics will only be loaded as needed. This ensures that the JVM does not run out on memory when methods that return large numbers of objects are called. This change fixed bugs 507 and 509.

Changes from 1.3 to 1.3.1

Omnigator

Some new features have been added or changed:

  • The export plug-in can now generate OSL schemas from existing topic maps.
  • The merge plug-in no longer does name-based merging by default. The option now has to be turned on explicitly.

The following bug was fixed:

  • Handling of associations with empty (un-specified) roleType fixed. See bug 413.

Navigator Framework

The behaviour of one tag has changed:

  • The logic:if tag now treats non-existent variables as being false. This makes it much easier to use the if tag.

The following bugs were fixed:

  • In some cases equals comparisons done with logic:if would give incorrect results. Now fixed. See Bug #503

Topic Map Engine

The following bugs were fixed:

  • Runtime license no longer expire after 24 hours. See bug 488.
  • Class loader license key problem fixed. See bug 484.
  • Compiling the OKS under JDK 1.4 caused problems with running it on 1.3. This is now fixed.
  • Security exceptions thrown by the getProperty() calls in applets are now caught. See bug 500.

Changes from 1.2.5 to 1.3

Omnigator

New features:

  • The subject index now shows the class hierarchy structure.
  • The class hierarchy structure can also be displayed as an image with links.
  • A new default stylesheet has been introduced.
  • Two new plug-ins were added: the tolog query plug-in, and the OSL schema validator plug-in.

The following bugs were fixed:

  • Bug #354: Statistics printer didn’t use user context.
  • Bug #399: The CSS stylesheets now uses relative fonts sizes.
  • Bug #427: The statistics plug-in incorrectly counted topic types with no names.
  • Bug #448: The statistics plug-in didn’t sort occurrences by type correctly.
  • Bug #459: The statistics plug-in association structure summary failed when association types had no name.

Navigator Framework

Changes:

  • The Acme GIF encoder has been replaced by better JGME encoder.
  • The TreeDiagramTag now produces transparent GIFs.
  • Multiple values are now allowed for object ids in context tag (bug #330). The navigator test framework has been extended to support this.
  • “function” elements can now have return values. This can be specified using the “return” attribute. The attribute should contain the name of a context variable whose value is to be returned. See bug #336.

The following bugs were fixed:

  • Bug #458: framework:setcontext would throw a NullPointerException when there was no user object in the session.
  • Bug #455: logic:if would silently accept testing on undefined variables. It now throws an error in this case.
  • Bug #464: logic:foreach would throw a NullPointerException when there was no user object in the session.
  • Bug #353: The “logic:set” tag didn’t take the user context into account when sorting.
  • Bug #363: It was not possible to override the default comparator.
  • Bug #449: Maximum list lengths can now be specified in the navigator configuration file.

Topic Map Engine

Notable changes in this release are:

  • All Ontopia Knowledge Suite components now support Java2 version 1.4.
  • Memory consumption has been reduced by, on average, 30%.
  • Support for LTM version 1.2 has been added. This new version contains some changes that break backwards compatibility. A python script for updating LTM topic maps to the new version is included in the distribution (${basedir}/utils/ltmfix.py). Usage: python ltmfix.py <oldfile> <newfile>
  • Added support for the “.hytm” file suffix in net.ontopia.topicmaps.utils.ImportExportUtils, because ISO recently renamed its old HyTime-based topic maps syntax to HyTM. See bug 419.
  • Data URLs used in HyTM topic maps are now being resolved into inline occurrences on import. HyTM export map inline occurrences back into data URLs. Note that this only apply to data URLs with the text/plain content type. See bug 355.
  • TopicTreeBuilder has been made more robust.
  • The test suite has been upgraded to use JUnit version 3.7.
  • The ReificationUtils class has two new methods: getReifyingTopics and getReifiedObjects.
  • The AssociationBuilder class now has new methods for building ternary associations.
  • The OntopiaRuntimeException has a new method getCause, which replaces the now deprecated getException, in order to be more in line with JDK 1.4 exceptions.
  • The TopicMapBuilderIF has a new method makeAssociationRole, which can also set the player of the role.

The following bugs were fixed:

  • Bug #269: The developer guide did not include documentation of topic map builders and factories.
  • Bug #300: The ordering of topic map objects in XTM canonicalization in some cases caused object to have the same sort key. The canonicalization specification was updated (version 1.1) to guarantee consistent ordering of objects with different properties. The canonicalizer has been updated according to the new specificiation.
  • Bug #432: elements occurring inside and referring to external topic maps didn’t cause those topic maps to be loaded. They should since the XTM specification clearly states that they should.
  • Bug #435: Resolving relative URI locators sometimes failed.
  • Bug #439: Error messages produced by the LTM processor has been made more readable.
  • Bug #461: The test suites produced lots of namespace-prefix related errors. These errors are now being filtered out by default, since they are of no importance.
  • Bug #442: The documentation of the MergeUtils.shouldMerge method was inaccurate. This has now been cleared up.

Full-text Integration

Changes:

  • The Lucene integration can now work with instances of org.apache.lucene.store.Directory directly. This will for example let you to create and search indexes in-memory using the RAMDirectory class.
  • The default token stream analyzer is now org.apache.lucene.analysis.standard.StandardAnalyzer, replacing StopAnalyzer.
  • Token stream analyzers can now be configured for use with the Lucene fulltext engine. This will let you plug your own analyzers. See the classes LuceneIndexer and LuceneSearcher for more information.

The following bugs have been fixed:

  • Bug #198: The IndexerIF.delete() method has been added. It lets you delete a fulltext index.
  • Bug #436: The fulltext plug-in didn’t take the user context into account when displaying topic names.
  • Bug #437: The fulltext plug-in didn’t process requests with extended characters properly.
  • Bug #440: The fulltext plug-in displayed long traceback when invalid queries was issued.

RDBMS Backend Connector

The following bugs have been fixed:

  • Bug #387: Adding objects that had been deleted earlier caused some of the object values to not be included.
  • Bug #317: Big imports ran out of memory.

Changes from 1.2.4 to 1.2.5

Navigator Framework

The main change in the navigator in this version is that we now bundle it with Tomcat 4.0, something that caused us to upgrade certain parts of the code. In addition we have added some tags, and fixed a number of bugs.

A number of changes were made in the navigator framework itself:

  • The ontojsp JSP execution environment has been updated to support JSP 1.2.
  • The web application and tag library descriptors were updated to conform to the Servlets 2.3 and JSP 1.2 specifications.
  • The <framework:setcontext> and <framework:getcontext> tags were added.
  • The methods getModule and getRootNode in net.ontopia.topicmaps.nav2.core.FunctionIF were deprecated.

The following bugs were fixed in the 1.2.5 version of the Navigator Framework:

  • Bug #405: fixing the behaviour of the <tm:superclasses> and <tm:subclasses> tags.
  • Bug #408: the sequence-first and sequence-last variables were not set correctly by the <logic:foreach> tag.
  • Bug #376: order of roles within each association in a list of associations was inconsistent.
  • Bug #238: fixed in September 2001, now officially closed.

In addition, some bugs were also fixed in the Omnigator:

  • Bug #376: in n-ary associations, topics playing the same role as the current topic were not displayed.
  • Bug #407: associations with no type caused page display to crash.
  • Bug #304: order of roles within each association in a list of associations was inconsistent.
  • Bug #406: binary associations where the same topic plays both roles were displayed as empty.

Topic Map Engine

There were few significant changes in the engine in this version.

  • Added the getSubclasses(class, level) and getSuperclasses(class, level) methods on net.ontopia.topicmaps.utils.TypeHierarchyUtils.
  • Added the getBaseAddress and setBaseAddress methods on the net.ontopia.topicmaps.entry.AbstractPathTopicMapSource class.

Three bugs were fixed in this release:

  • Bug #300: in some cases canonicalization of topic maps would give topics the same sort keys, thus giving random ordering of some topics.
  • Bug #410: when importing LTM files which had a topic with the sort name PSI and when that topic itself had a sort name the LTM parser would produce bad topic map object structures.
  • Bug #397: ISO exporter would fail when exporting association roles with no player.

Full-text Integration

The following bugs have been fixed:

  • Bug #378: Fulltext testsuite failed on default install (Windows only)
  • Bug #390: The Ontopia Full-text Integration - A Developer’s Guide document has been updated to include information about the RDBMS URL scheme.

RDBMS Backend Connector

The following public class has been added::

  • RDBMSTopicMapReader

The following bug has been fixed:

  • Bug #390: The RDBMS Backend Connector - A Developer’s Guide has been updated to include information about the RDBMS URL scheme.

Changes from 1.2.3 to 1.2.4

Navigator Framework

This release has seen a number of minor improvements in the navigator framework. The changes in the tag libraries are:

  • The output:treediagram tag no longer uses Batik, but instead uses an open source GIF encoder. This makes the distribution a lot smaller.
  • The tm:names tag now rejects duplicate name objects.

In addition, the navigator developer’s guide has been extended with more detailed information on how to use the tm:lookup tag.

Topic Map Engine

This release was primarily made to satisfy customer requests for functionality in the full-text integration. Changes in the engine are limited to a few new method, and a minor extension to the engine developer’s guide.

The following methods has been added:

  • net.ontopia.topicmaps.utils.TopicTreeRendrer.renderImage()
  • net.ontopia.topicmaps.utils.ImportExportUtils.getReader(String propfile, String filename_or_url)
  • net.ontopia.topicmaps.utils.ImportExportUtils.getReader(Map properties, String filename_or_url)

Full-text Integration

The following features has been added:

  • The LuceneIndexer command line tool can now index topic maps via the RDBMS Backend Connector. Such topic maps can be referenced using URLs of the following type “x-tm:rdbms:”, e.g. “x-tm:rdbms:5001”.
  • The LuceneIndexer now accepts the –props=propfile option, which references the topic map store properties file.

RDBMS Backend Connector

The following constructors has been added - all to make it possible to pass topic map store properties as a Map instance:

  • RDBMSTopicMapStore(Map properties)
  • RDBMSTopicMapStore(Map properties, long topicmap_id)
  • RDBMSTopicMapSource(Map properties)

Changes from 1.2.2 to 1.2.3

Navigator Framework

This release adds some new tags, and fixes a large number of bugs. The changes in the tag libraries are:

  • The tm:topics tag can now have other tags as content.
  • The tm:lookup tag has two new attributes: basename and variant.
  • The output:name tag has a new attribute ‘stringifier’, which can be used to control the rendering of names.
  • The logic:if tag has a new attribute ‘sizeEquals’, which can be used to test the size of a collection.

The following bugs were fixed in the Navigator Framework in this release:

The following bugs were fixed in the Omnigator in this release:

  • Bug #352: Main subjects overdoes it for topic maps.
  • Bug #356: Incorrect order in “Subject indexes”.

Topic Map Engine

The following method has been added:

  • net.ontopia.topicmaps.utils.ClassInstanceUtils.resolveAssociations()

One old bug has been fixed:

  • Bug #67: Class-instance associations not recognized

RDBMS Backend Connector

The following features has been added:

  • Support for JDBC batch writing. This option boosts performance with large transactions and in environments where network lag is an issue, since the number of network requests needed is significantly lower and the database may provide optimizations for performing lots of similar database modifications in batches.
  • JDBC Connection pooling. Note that this features requires the JDBC 2.0 Optional Package API to be installed. See the requirements section in the installation guide for more information.
  • Ability to disable conforming queries via configuration property, i.e. no longer guaranteeing that database query results matches changes in the current transaction. In this case there may be outstanding transaction changes that have not been written to the database to the time the query is issued. Be careful when disabling conforming queries.
  • Subject identity lookup in the database can be disabled via a configuration property. Warning: This option should only be used when it is known that topic map objects in the database with requested identities does not exist.

Changes in the database schema:

  • The following changes were done in the database schema because of the column name ‘value’ sometimes conflicting with the ‘VALUE’ SQL keyword. If you have database instances using the old database schema you need to perform the following changes the database schema:
  • Rename TM_BASE_NAME.value to TM_BASE_NAME.content
  • Rename TM_VARIANT_NAME.value to TM_VARIANT_NAME.content
  • Rename TM_OCCURRENCE.value to TM_OCCURRENCE.content

Changes from 1.2.1 to 1.2.2

Navigator Framework

This release adds some new tags, and fixes a large number of bugs. The changes in the tag libraries are:

  • The new tm:sourceLocators tag for retrieving the source locators of a topic map object has been added.
  • The new tm:reified tag for retrieving the object reified by a topic has been added.
  • The tm:filter tag has a new attribute ‘is’, which can be used to filter objects according to whether they are topics, base names, occurrences, associations, or something else.
  • The tm:filter tag can now use instances of DeciderIF and not just NavigatorDeciderIF.
  • The ‘sequence-index’ variable set by the logic:foreach tag now begins with 1, rather than 0, as it used to.

The following bugs were fixed in the Navigator Framework in this release:

The following bugs were fixed in the Omnigator in this release:

  • Bug #320: Reified topic map objects not displyed on topic.
  • Bug #349: Make Omnigator display better in Netscape 4.

Topic Map Engine

The following method has been added:

  • net.ontopia.topicmaps.core.TopicMapTransactionIF.getBuilder()

Changes from 1.2 to 1.2.1

Navigator Framework

Added the framework:response JSP tag, which sets response headers according to its attribute values or the application defaults.

What’s new in version 1.2

Version 1.2 of the Ontopia Navigator Framework and the Ontopia Omnigator is a complete rewrite of the entire navigator framework, and also of the Omnigator, which has now been implemented using the new framework. The old navigator is still included in the distribution, but the documentation has been taken out.

We have replaced the old tag libraries with a completely new set of tag libraries, which are designed according to different principles. We think that the new tag libraries are enormously much easier to learn than the previous ones, and that they are also much more flexible. The Omnigator has been completely re-implemented (making the current version the fifth implementation from scratch) using the new tag libraries.

Since the entire navigator package has been entirely replaced by a new package there is no list of changes. Note that we expect changes to the navigator from this point on to be backwards-compatible, except where current features are marked as experimental in the documentation.

Topic Map Engine

There were few changes in this new release. Some new functionality has been added, and some problems have been fixed, but in general very little has happened with the engine.

Two improvements have been made:

  • when importing XTM documents, unknown elements in the XTM namespace are now warned about, and
  • MergeUtils did not copy source locators from source objects to target objects, but this is now fixed.

Four new classes have been added:

  • net.ontopia.topicmaps.utils.ImportExportUtils,
  • net.ontopia.topicmaps.utils.ReificationUtils,
  • net.ontopia.topicmaps.utils.AssociationBuilder, and
  • net.ontopia.topicmaps.utils.DuplicateSuppressionUtils.

Only one bugs were fixed in this release:

  • Bug #259; misspelling the name of the topicMap element causes NullPointerExceptions.
  • Bug #305; topic map ID sometimes set to file URI on export.
  • Bug #308; LTM reader did not handle duplicate subject indicators.

Changes from 1.1.2 to 1.1.3

Navigator Framework

Reviewed the classes in package nav.utils.comparators; BaseNameComparator deprecated, NameComparator takes sort variant into account if available.

nav.context.UserFilterContextStore extended to also store variant name scoping themes (basides base name scope)

Topic Map Engine

Occurrence.toString() now prints contents of inline occurrences.

CollectionUtils.getRandom() now delivers a really random entry.

Four bugs have been fixed:

  • Bug #237 fixed; export of empty and null strings generally improved,
  • Bug #241 fixed; XTMContentHandler and internal class ContentHandler of XMLConfigSource now use qualified name of element instead of local name in methods startElement and endElement,
  • Bug #244 fixed; subject indicator references from topics to reified topic map objects are no longer broken on export to XTM format, and
  • Bug #245 fixed; the ISO export can now handle the case where the PSI for display or sort name appears as a source locator instead of as a subject indicator.

Changes from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2

Navigator Framework

A new plug-in has been added: the “LTM add” plug-in, which lets you add content to already loaded topic maps using LTM syntax.

A part of the documentation relating to how connect the navigator to the RDBMS backend was updated.

Topic Map Engine

The LTMTopicMapReader class now also implements the TopicMapImporterIF interface.

The NameGrabber class can now grab names appearing in a specific scope defined by a collection of topics.

Some problems with the test suite, both on Windows and generally, have been fixed.

Two bugs have been fixed:

Changes from 1.1 to 1.1.1

Navigator Framework

The major change in this release is that we have upgraded the bundled version of tomcat, closing a security hole. Other than that the main changes are bug fixes.

Topic Map Engine

Only very minor changes have been made to the engine. These are:

Changes from 1.0.x to 1.1

Navigator Framework

Overview

Since version 1.1 the code of the Navigator Framework has been further improved through optimizations, some internal refactoring of the code, and also a number of bug fixes. The result is a version of the framework that is decidedly more mature and performs better. In particular, loading topic maps is now substantially faster than in previous versions.

In addition to the improvements to the framework, the Omnigator has been revisited and its user interface further improved. Some bugs have also been fixed in the Omnigator, making it able to handle even more topic maps.

This release also contains substantially improved and extended documentation compared to the 1.0.x releases.

The main improvements, however, fall in the category of extended functionality. The following are the main extensions:

  • The Navigator framework has been extended to support a user context filter, which users can use to apply scope filtering to topic maps, in order to filter out unnecessary information or, for example, switch the language they are navigating in. The user context filter is described in more detail in The Ontopia Omnigator User Guide.
  • The Navigator has been extended with the concept of plug-ins, which are encapsulated functionality that can be dropped into Navigator applications. This concept is described in the Ontopia Navigator Plug-ins Developer’s Guide.
  • The Navigator now has native support for the textual LTM topic map format (described in a separate technology note), which means that LTM files can now be loaded directly into Navigator applications.

The log4j package used by the engine to provide logging of actions has been upgraded from version 1.0.4 to version 1.1.3, which has given better performance in some cases.

Detailed changelog

The application.xml file has been extended to allow users to specify the default model, view, and skin. It is also possible to extend the lists of models and views. Skins are now found by scanning a specified directory for CSS stylesheets.

The superTypes tag now has an excludeTypes argument in the args attribute, which can be used to keep the types of the current topic out of the list of supertypes.

The following new tags have been added:

  • DescriptionOccurrencesTag
  • FacetValueTypesTag
  • IndexScopesTag
  • ResourceFacetValuesTag
  • SubjectIndicatorsParentTopicsTag

See The Ontopia Navigator Tag Library Reference for more information on these tags.

Topic Map Engine

Overview

In general, the changes to the Topic Map Engine itself have not been very substantial. The main changes have been made externally, such as the addition of an RDBMS backend, modifications to the Navigator, integration of the Fulltext Search capability, and so on.

A number of optimizations have been done, however, resulting in markedly improved performance for some operations, like importing XML topic maps. A number of minor bugs have also been fixed, and XML import is now more robust, and also gives better error messages than before.

The URILocator class has been rewritten from scratch. The original was based on the java.net.URL, which meant that it couldn’t handle non-standard URI protocols or characters in URIs that were not in the platform default character set. It was also too slow. The new implementation solves all these problems.

The engine now has native support for the textual LTM topic map format (described in a separate technology note), which means that LTM files can now be imported directly into the object model. This support is found in the net.ontopia.topicmaps.utils.ltm package.

The log4j package used by the engine to provide logging of actions has been upgraded from version 1.0.4 to version 1.1.3, which has given better performance in some cases.

The test suite has been extended with about 150 new test cases, making it substantially more comprehensive.

Detailed changelog

The main API changes have been in the net.ontopia.topicmaps.utils package, where the changes listed below have been made. Some methods have also been deprecated and added; see the javadoc for these. Generally the API changes have been quite limited.

  • Added the NameGrabber class in the package. This is a generally useful class used to pick out the in some sense most appropriate name from a topic.
  • Added the TopicCharacteristicsGrabbers class as a generalization of DisplayNameGrabber. DisplayNameGrabber was deprecated accordingly.
  • Added the UnconstrainedScopeDecider class as an easy way to make other scope deciders accept all objects in the unconstrained scope.