Re: Business Applications

Hello Sebastian,

I am the creator of Topincs, a software for rapid development of web databases and web applications with Topic Maps at its heart. It is a long running project - started in 2005 - which recently (beginning of the year) matured to actually run business applications with up to 30 users.

The basic development approach is the following: declare your model by using the Topic Maps Constraints Language (TMCL) - now Topincs gives you all the pages for viewing, editing and navigating the instance data (also on mobile devices). It also gives you a virtual object oriented programming interface in PHP to program services. A service takes some topics and some values, does some computation and and may render the result in one or more formats (most common: html). It gels into the user interface nicely by providing semantic context menus on topics, either on their page or on links to their page. In general, code fragments are usually tiny, unless it comes to reports, then they grow indefinitely and still make you crazy. 

If you are curious, Piotr Kopszak recently wrote a blog post about his experiences with Topincs and Topic Maps:
http://kle.typepad.com/wunderkammern/2012/08/modeling-topic-maps-in-topincs.html

If you want to read in more detail about Topincs, pls go here:
http://www.cerny-online.com/topincs/

Best regards,

Robert Cerny

Sebastian wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I've been quite enthusiastic for a while about ontologies and related tools. I've attempted to develop some semantic/knowledge enabled applications. I'd really like to see some examples somewhere of how such an application would look like. It seemed to me at first that semantics would be a big revolution in application development.
> 
> The business needs I'm trying to address and some features are drafted in a document at http://cognescent.googlecode.com/files/Brochure.pdf. In some parts I try detail some thoughts regarding how I think an implementation could be technically implemented. Are there any patterns or frameworks where one can learn how to do such application as one would usually do with a n-tier J2EE application, for example?
> 
> I always find myself like trying to reinvent the wheel and, perhaps because I'm missing something, I end up just not willing to have just a triple store replacing a traditional database and currently I cannot figure out the patterns or layers that could comprise a real semantic application beyond that. Are there any examples? Are the model, view, controller concepts still valid? How a semantic app UI should look like.
> 
> Best regards,
> Sebastian.
> 
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