Open Source

With the Internet becoming the major medium of communication, business, ... and life, we have observed the growing popularity and importance of the open source software. We can risk saying that the open source solutions were one of the major assets contributing to the success of the Web.

Knowledge Hives has been brought up in the research community where contributing to the open source was a very common practice. We understand that in order to support the coming of third generation of the Internet (Web 3.0) a host of open source software needs to become widely accessible.

Apart from our contribution to open source solutions delivered by others, a part of the mission of Knowledge Hives is to continue the research and development efforts of the Corrib.org group that has delivered many open source projects based on the research on the Web 3.0. In addition to publishing our own open source solutions and contributing to the existing open source projects, especially from the Corrib.org group, we provide commercial support that allows to leverage the potential of the open source software in more demanding environments, e.g., enterprises or large organizations.

Our Open Source Products

We believe in the power of community developed software, hence we will continue to increase the number of software project contributed to the open source community.

Here is the complete list of open source projects we have contributed so far.

Vulcan

Vulcan is a set of tools for facilitating the process of developing and deploying J2EE applications. It was created to provide functionality which was either not present or too complex in Java EE 5 platform.

Learn more about Vulcan at our open source wiki.

Hermes

Hermes is a lightweight messaging service for applications based on J2SE/J2EE technologies. It allows to send and receive messages between various components of the application. Hermes can be easily used in J2SE applications, as it does not relay on the J2EE application server.

Learn more about Hermes at our open source wiki.

FOAFRealm

FOAFRealm is a service for authentication of users and management of users' profiles. It allows distributed authentication and trust infrastructure without a centralized authority. FOAFRealm delivers a backbone infrastructure for trust applications based on social relationships and allows to establish identity of users similar to the way we establish identity and trust in real life. It is based on solutions like the P2P HyperCuP topology and the FOAF ontology for expressing relationships between users on the Semantic Web.

The project was started by Sebastian Kruk in 2004. The first prototype was delivered in June 2004 as a submission to the FOAF Workshop in Galway.

Current version delivers a realm plugin for Apache Tomcat, together with a set of Java libraries and JSP/Servlets/Ajax user interface (the Aparicio component). Future implementations will deliver bindings for J2EE, .NET and PHP frameworks.

The project has been heavily supported in the past by DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland and Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland.

Learn more about FOAFRealm at our open source wiki.

DeliciousCluster

Growing number of tags can pretty quickly become a nightmare for active users.
Within just one year of heavy use of systems like del.icio.us one can aggregate over 1000 bookmarks with more than 300 tags.

DeliciousCluster is a smart, lightweight, extensible library for clustering user's tags from tagging sources, such as del.icio.us.
It takes a flat list of tags (or more precisely a tag multiset) and attempts to deliver a hierarchical tag multiset, hence limiting the number of tags rendered at the highest level.

As an example, DeliciousCluster uses simple text similarity metrics to perform clustering. However, the library allows to easily replace this naive approach with more thorough similarity measures and clustering algorithms.

This project has been based on the code contributed within the TagsTreeMaps project under the Corrib license owned by DERI, NUI Galway.

The TagsTreeMaps project delivered a component for more efficient filtering of tagging space, using del.icio.us as an proof-of-concept service.
The clustering algorithm has been however tightly integrated into the TagsTreeMaps prototype making it virtually impossible in other projects.
We have extracted and reworked parts of the algorithm to improve importing and clustering procedure and to simplify the use of this algorithms in external projects.

Learn more about DeliciousCluster at our open source wiki.

OpenVocabulary

Open Vocabulary (OV) delivers Java API and REST API to streamline use of controlled vocabularies, such as thesauri and taxonomies. It operates on vocabularies delivered in RDF using SKOS ontology; hence it is very easy to provide support for countless number of vocabularies that are already delivered in SKOS or can be easily translated into.

At the moment OV comes with following vocabularies:

top five levels of DMoz taxonomy
all levels of the Polish localization of the DMoz taxonomy
complete WordNet/RDF
complete OpenThesaurus-Polish* (translated by us into SKOS)

Open Vocabulary grew out of the JOnto project that Corrib.org, supported by DERI, NUI Galway, has been working on. The main advantages of OV compared to JOnto are:

support only for RDF vocabularies (SKOS ontology used by default)
unified access to terms from thesauri, taxonomies and tags
redesigned and simplified Java API
redesigned and extended REST API
new, agile terms selector based on Facebook entry box concept
support for OpenThesaurs vocabularies**

Open Vocabulary was built with the support for Linking Open Data initiative in mind. Therefore, vocabularies were are not already LOD-supported are moved to the http://www.openvocabulary.info/ space.

Learn more about Open Vocabulary at our open source wiki.

Commercial Support for the Corrib.org Open Source Projects

Corrib.org group was set up in 2005 to streamline the collaboration between Gdansk University of Technology and DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway. The group consisted mostly of the interns and junior researchers from GUT who worked with the DERI team. The focus of the Corrib.org group was on delivering open source software prototypes of the research in the Semantic Digital Libraries domain. In result more than 10 open source projects were delivered.

Since the Corrib.org group grew out to conduct their separate research streams, focusing on own PhD research, we have decided to support what has already been built, and if at all possible, continue to improve and extend Corrib.org projects. At the moment we focus on the two most mature projects: JeromeDL and MarcOnt.

JeromeDL

JeromeDL is a Social Semantic Digital Library. As a digital library, it allows institutions to easily publish documents on the Web. It supports a variety of document formats and allows to store and query a rich bibliographic description of each document. To find relevant documents in users can use searching and browsing features. Whole documents content can be searched through, as well as single fields of the documents description, like author or publish year. Users can also find documents by browsing content of subject categories and keywords.

With JeromeDL's social and semantic services every library user can bookmark interesting books, articles or other materials in semantically annotated directories. Users can allow others to see their bookmarks and annotations and share their knowledge within a social network. JeromeDL can also treat a single library resource as a blog post. Users can comment the content of the resource and reply to others' comments and this way create new knowledge.

The community support for JeromeDL is a "best efforts" mechanism that can be used freely, but without any guarantees about (timely) responses. Knowledge Hives offers training, setup, and maintenance service for JeromeDL. We will help you to design and deploy a semantic digital library for your needs, guide you through the new capabilities offered by JeromeDL, and help you to maintain your semantic digital library.

The project is the result of the joint research and development effort of DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland and Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland.

Learn more about JeromeDL at http://www.jeromedl.org/.

MarcOnt

MarcOnt - is a set of tools designed for collaborative ontology development. It introduces the concept of suggestions, negotiations and versioning applied to the ontology life-cycle. MarcOnt is applied in JeromeDL project helping to develop MarcOnt Ontology - the bibliographic ontology and mediation format. It presents the idea that the mediation information for one ontology should follow the same life-cycle pattern as the ontology itself.

Knowledge Hives sp. z o.o. provides professional training in ontology development. Upon our clients request we can set up a dedicated MarcOnt Portal instance for our clients, provide training and maintenance. We can help our clients to integrate MarcOnt Portal and ontology development procedures into the semantic software development life cycle.

The project has been heavily supported in the past by DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland and Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland.

Learn more about whole MarcOnt Initiative, and MarcOnt Portal in particular, at http://www.marcont.org/

Contributing to other open source projects

In our everyday research and development, from time to time, we stumble upon smaller open source projects that could use a little help to. We do not shy away from them, but eagerly contribute to make them better. Do not be surprised to see our names popping up on the lists of contributors from time to time.

* not available in the open source package
** only Polish thesaurus currently supported; delivering other thesauri on demand, requires commercial license

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