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Technology

This page lists my current and older tech projects.

Software

Currently I am working on NetworkedPlanet's suite of products. These include:

  • BrightstarDB is a NoSQL database for .NET that happens to also be a native .NET triple store. BrightstarDB also provides its own ORM layer including .NET data-binding and LINQ query support.

  • Data Platform is a complete solution for publishing Linked Open Data. It combines BrightstarDB with the Orchard CMS to make it easy to get your data published as 5-Star quality Open Data.

Before I started NetworkedPlanet, I was working on a number of open-source Java tools, which I've kept links to here for historical reasons. Unfortunately none of these projects are much maintained at the moment, but the source code is still there for anyone who wants to play.

  • TM4J is an open-source (Apache licensed) topic map engine for Java. It includes support for in-memory only processing as well as a range of different persistence options.

  • TMTab is a plugin for the Protégé ontology editor that allows you to build an ontology that can then be exported as a topic map in standard XTM syntax.

  • MDF - the Meta-Data processing Framework, is a Java toolkit for extracting data from a variety of sources and munging it into topic maps or RDF.

  • RELAX-NG Documentation Tools - are a set of XSLT stylesheets for generating Docbook documentation and SVG graphics from a RELAX-NG schema.

Data

This site hosts a variety of freely-downloadable topic map data covering a variety of subjects from the diary of Samuel Pepys to the W3C XML Schema Specification.

Writing

This site is an archive for some of my older publications and papers - primarily on the subject of topic maps. Newer writing can be found on the NetworkedPlanet website, the BrightstarDB website and of course on this blog. Older papers available here include:

  • Topic Map Applications - a paper from 2001 about the (then) new Topic Maps standard and how it was being used in real-world applications by a variety of consultancies and companies.

  • A Practical Introduction to Topic Maps is a paper from 2002 that does more or less what the title would indicate.

  • A Proposal for Extending Scope in XTM was written in 2002 to try and show how it might be possible to improve the notion of context in topic maps. Ultimately though the forces of simplicity prevailed :-)

  • Topic Map Design Patterns for Information Architecture introduces a variant of the UML class diagram for describing topic map models; the concept of design patterns as they apply to developing modular, reusable ontologies; and a collection of design patterns around standard information architecture concepts such as hierarchical and faceted classification

  • Topic Map Fragment Exchange In a Peer-To-Peer Application describes an approach to and application for the peer-to-peer distribution of topic maps and includes a description of an algorithm for extracting and combining topic map fragments.

Semantics

The Techquila domain is used as the namespace for a number of Published Subject Identifiers relating to classification, hierarchical organisation and faceted organisation using topic maps. These PSIs will remain on this site, and continue to be maintained as needed.