I’ve been playing around with Ontopoly topic map for the last week. It comes with its own Tomcat server. You have to start and stop Tomcat manually which is clunky. I wanted to have it run on my existing Tomcat server which I have set up as a service. There was no info out there about how to do it so this is what I did…

(If you’ve already downloaded Ontopoly this will be clear)

Copy these files over from OKS Samplers to Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat:

C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\bin
[I copied everything over but didn’t replace/write-over anything - just added]

C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\common\classes\log4j.properties
C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\common\classes\tm-sources.xml (this one took me a while to find and it’s *very important*)

C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\conf\jaas.config (added)

C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\logs
[copied everything over but didn’t replace/write-over anything - just added]

C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\webapps
Omnigator (replaced entire folder)
Ontopoly (replaced entire folder)

C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\work\Catalina\localhost\ontopoly\SESSIONS.ser (replaced)
C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\work\Catalina\localhost\ontopoly\tldCache.ser (replaced)

I’m no Tomcat or Ontopoly expert so I can’t say specifically what these files do (apart from tm-sources.xml which points to all your topic map sources, like an index). Sufficive to say, they make Ontopoly work on Tomcat, which is all I wanted to achieve.

So now I’ve got Ontopoly running on my Tomcat service which means I can “localhost:8080″ into Ontolply anytime I want.

Nice!

KM Mapping tools

April 8, 2008

I’m doing my dissertation on knowledge mapping, an elusive and misunderstood area, with tremendous potential for KM.

My supervisor advised me to look at XML Topic Maps, and boy, was she right! No other approach to mapping that I researched came close to really delivering.

For anyone interested, here’s a huge amount of information for a start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_Maps

http://topicmap.com/topicmap/tools.html

This is a good place to start reading: The TAO of topic maps

I downloaded Ontopia and tm4j so far and am trying to install them. I’m more interested in a web based application as I want to deploy on an intranet.

I’ll be investigating these in the next few days.

In the meantime, check out this very comprehensive review by Margaret Hilsbos.

This tool looks like it could be very powerful for knowledge mapping and mining purposes:

Xobni outlook add-in for your inbox

I’m not sure the developers are marketing this tool as as a knowledge mining tool, but it’s definitley one way I’d like to employ it.

If there was a version of this tool that could plug into the corporate mail server it would be extremely powerful. That would reveal some very interesting stats and insights!!

http://www.xobni.com