Semantic Turkey Advanced User Manual

This manual deals with advanced features related to system customization/reconfiguration. We classify topics according to three kind of "advanced" users:

The above list does not include developers (e.g. people customizing the system, or extending it through dedicated extensions or implementation of available extension points). A dedicated developers page is provided for them.

Project and Behavior Customization

Custom Ranges

ST provides a way to customize the range of properties beyond what is written in their axioms, and also to define custom forms for enabling the creation of complex objects upon valueing them

Custom ID/URI generation

Semantic Turkey allows for the customization of generated URIs for the resources being created while editing.

From version 0.12 of Semantic Turkey, a new powerful URI generation mechanism has been made available.

Note for developers: The custom ID generator is also a useful facility for developers writing their own services where the automatic generation of URIs is requested. See the custom ID generation section in the development manual for more information. The URI generation is now driven by a dedicated extension point, of which the customizable URI generator bundled with ST represents a single instance. If the customization facilities provided by the default URI generator are not enough, it is possible to build a new one and plug it to the system.

Rendering Engine

ST provides a way to customize the rendering of resources on the user interfaces accessing its content.

Customizing Project Properties

Semantic Turkey stores project-related information inside a specific configuration file (called project.info) located in each project folder.

It is possible to access this file directly by inspecting the project directory (SemanticTurkeyData/projects/<projectName>) or, if using the ST Firefox client, by selecting the following option:

and then , through this window:

it is possible to double click on each property and change the related value.

It is also possible to manually edit the whole content of the file (for instance, in order to add a new property which is not already present) by selecting the button at the bottom of this window, with the label: "Edit raw property file".

Using ST HTTP Services

Semantic Turkey provides HTTP-based services for accessing all of its functionalities. These services can be used by those users needing some batch operations complementing the normal use of the application through its UI (e.g. Semantic Turkey Firefox client or VocBench), or by developers exploting the Semantic Turkey framework to power third-party applications.

System Administration

Running Karaf in different modes

The Karaf manual provides a dedicated page for instructions on how to run Karaf in background, without console, etc..

There's also a thread on the mailing list about this topic.

Collaborative Support in Semantic Turkey

The Semantic Turkey RDF framework allows for concurrent accesses to its services. However, in its Firefox client incarnation, it is meant to be used as a local desktop tool.

Though no multiuser/collaborative support is available, there is a partial, limited (but very practical and easy to setup) support for group editing.

Just run the server on the machine you want to access from multiple clients.

In each of the clients, type about:config on the Firefox address bar . In the filter, type: semturkey, and you will see a series of properties specific for ST.

You can overwrite the property extensions.semturkey.server.host and put the address of your centralized server machine. Then restart firefox.

Now you can have these clients access to your RDF server on the centralized machine.

There are just two limitations, due to the desktop nature of ST-FF:

  1. From version 0.10 on, ST allows for multiproject management (exploited by collaborative frameworks such as vocbench). However, due to its desktop-use scope, the firefox client is configured to close one project when it opens a new one (we will provide a non-closing modality in next versions). This means you can only open one project at a time. So if one user opens one project, and then another user opens another project, the first user will have its client disaligned.
  2. File upload. The functionalities requiring to load a file from the file system have been modified in order to accept POST requests containing the file to be uploaded. However, most of the services are still working by means of reference to the file system. For such cases, you need to perform the action with a Firefox installed on the same machine of the server.

Collaborative editing is not a priority now in the ST-Firefox client, but we will most probably address the above limitations in the future.

If you need a web based system for collaborative editing of SKOSXL thesauri (no OWL at the moment), you may try vocbench, which is based on the ST framework too but adds a web based user authentication layer.