A new version (0.6.0) of Atramhasis has been released. Atramhasis is an open-source, web-based SKOS editor. You can use it to browse SKOS vocabularies, thesauri, authority files, word lists, … Atramhasis comes with an admin interface you can use to add the concepts and collections of your vocabularies. To make integrating vocabularies with your other IT systems easy, all data in Atramhasis is exposed through a read an write REST webservice.
This release is a major update based on the Skosprovider 0.7.0 line of libraries. The major new features of this release have to do with Linked Data. It is now possible to have Atramhasis create nightly dumps per conceptscheme. Before, they had to be created on the fly. Which was a rather costly operation for larger conceptschemes. Using these nightly dumps it’s now very easy to run your own Linked Data Fragments server. The new version can generate a config file for such a server that you can use to setup the server. By default this config will work with the Turtle files that can be generated every night. But if you have access to the https://github.com/rdfhdt/hdt-cpp, you can also work with HDT files for a masssive performance boost. See the section Running a Linked Data Fragments server in the Atramhasis documentation for more information.
Other minor enhancements were added as well. It’s now possible to have Atramhasis generate URI’s for concepts when importing a conceptscheme on the commandline. Previously, if you imported a CSV or JSON file that didn’t contain URI’s, they would be generated using a default pattern that ensured internal data integrity but was never the right pattern for the user. It is now possible to specify such a pattern when importing. If for some reason, this is not sufficient, users are advised to generate the URI’s before importing as Atramhasis will respect those.
A new type of labels callel sortlabels have also been added. Users can add these to concepts and collections to make it possible to apply custom sorting strategies. Most thesauri are seen as textual in nature and users expect these to be sorted alphanumerically. But some thesauri are different. Flanders Heritage has a list of historic periods. For a conceptscheme like this, alphanumerical sorting makes little sense. Most people want to see this conceptscheme sorted chronologically. Th expect Roman to be listed before Medieval. While version 0.6.0 does not yet show this sort order in the public user interface, you can now start applying sortlabels. By creating a special label you can thus force the order of concepts. For the moment this is already accessible through the REST interface, future version will apply this logic to the tree view as well. It might be important to note that these work like other labels as well, so they are language dependent as well.
As always, bugs have been fixed, code has been rewritten and documenation has been updated. See https://github.com/OnroerendErfgoed/atramhasis/releases/tag/0.6.0 for the full list of changes.
We invite everybody to try out the release. You can see a working example of Atramhasis at https://thesaurus.onroerenderfgoed.be, a customised version of Atramhasis containing the thesauri use by Flanders Heritage Agency. If you encounter problems, please let us know. Either through the forum or our Github tracker.
