Ruby
Topic Maps

It has been quiet a while around RTM. The diploma thesis around it was successfully completed in early May 2008 and other time-consuming projects followed. The most important of all is founding of the Topic Maps Lab, followed by scientific research, customer surveys and a business plan. Phase I of this venture was successfully completed end of 2008 and we’re close a next major step now. We hired a great team and will move to our new, bigger offices next week. Expect new releases, new features, new storage back ends in the next months. Stay tuned.

Some more details about referencing topics and creating topics by reference have been added below.

gem install rtm

Celebrating this event, I’m releasing version 0.1.1 featuring some code clean up, bug fixes and such. Maybe you’ll also find a tardy easter-egg inside.
By the way, this gem was packaged using JRuby – RTM runs fine on JRuby :-)

And, I forgot to say, the type-instance and supertype-subtype-stuff mentioned below, also works like this:

require ‘rtm’

RTM.connect

tm = RTM.create “urn:/bla”

tm.get!(“a1”).add_type(“A”)

tm.get!(“b2”).add_type(“B”)

tm.get!(“c3”).add_type(“C”)

tm.get(“A”).add_subtype(“B”)

tm.get(“B”).add_subtype(“C”)

Greetings from Oslo, Norway! After a 3 hour tutorial at the Topic Maps 2008 conference this morning some bugs were ironed out and RTM is now considered Beta. Try the new gem, it’s in the Download section and will soon be in the official gem repository.

A new preview release is available.

• The import has full XML namespace support now thanks to Alexander Mikhailian from Space Applications Services and supports reifier properties (which were disregarded before).
• Type-instance and supertype-subtype associations can be accessed in one single step now. The following example shows how it works.
  You can run the following code directly in irb, please note ca and cr are the short hand commands for
  create_association and create_role:
  

  
  
  
  
  require ‘rtm’
  
  RTM.connect
  
  tm = RTM.create “urn:/bla”
  
  a = tm.ca RTM::PSI[:type_instance]
  
  a.cr “a1”, RTM::PSI[:instance]
  
  a.cr “A”, RTM::PSI[:type]
  
  a2 = tm.ca RTM::PSI[:type_instance]
  
  a2.cr “b2”, RTM::PSI[:instance]
  
  a2.cr “B”, RTM::PSI[:type]
  
  a3 = tm.ca RTM::PSI[:type_instance]
  
  a3.cr “c3”, RTM::PSI[:instance]
  
  a3.cr “C”, RTM::PSI[:type]
  
  
  
  a4 = tm.ca RTM::PSI[:supertype_subtype]
  
  a4.cr “A”, RTM::PSI[:supertype]
  
  a4.cr “B”, RTM::PSI[:subtype]
  
  a5 = tm.ca RTM::PSI[:supertype_subtype]
  
  a5.cr “B”, RTM::PSI[:supertype]
  
  a5.cr “C”, RTM::PSI[:subtype]
  
  
  
  tm.get(“A”).direct_instances # returns topic a1
  
  tm.get(“A”).instances # returns topics a1, b2, c3
  
  tm.get(“b2”).direct_types # returns topic B
  
  tm.get(“c3”).types # returns topics A, B, C
  
            

  
  The code for that is automatically created from the model, so it’s possible to add own special associations.
  Documentation will follow later, be consoled for now: source code never lies (-;
  Please be aware that the current implementation is recursive and fails if there are loops.

I thought it is a good idea to also upload the slides from TMRA, so here they are: RTM presentation slides.

The day before TMRA, I gave a 3 hours tutorial on programming Ruby and using RTM. It covered standalone Ruby and basic usage of RTM in the first part. In the second part we created a Ruby on Rails web application and integrated RTM into it.
The slides were mostly a guideline through the tutorial and a reference for explaining things. Without these explanations and the demonstrations I did, it is a load of theory. I removed a bunch of organizational slides to not clutter it up too much.

This is the preliminary web site for Ruby Topic Maps which has been presented at TMRA 2007.