Uriverse, a site which aims to provide an interesting and compelling interface to linked data sources, has just had its initial alpha release.

Much of the world’s knowledge has been recorded in Wikipedia, a wiki contributed to by thousands of authors and editors dispersed across the globe. The English version of Wikipedia contains approximately 4 million articles and categories. There are approximately 90 other Wikipedias in different languages. Wikipedia is published under a Creative Commons license which makes it possible for other publishers to make use of the data.

DBpedia is a semantic web project which has taken Wikipedia and extracted semantic information from the wiki markup text. Each article becomes a subject about which statements are made in the form of Subject-Predicate-Object triples. This simple data model allows for the creation of properties and relationship between subjects and literals. The newly formed data is then published by DBpedia for consumption by RDF and database tools.

The DBpedia subjects have a central roll to play in the development of the semantic web as they provide a method to address the subjects humans and machines would like to make statements about. Each subject is represented by a URI, a key component of the web, which can be dereferenced to indicate what the subject is about. The URI therefore plays the dual rolls of identifying the subject (a unique string) and presenting what it is about (the resource itself).

The initial release of Uriverse has taken version 3.4 of the DBpedia dataset and imported it into the Drupal content management system. The process was not entirely lossless, however, the vast majority of it was able to fit into the constructs provided by Drupal. The final outcome is a website which has a pleasant interface to browse DBpedia. Drupal also has the advantage of providing a foundation on which further logic can be added to incorporate other datasets.

In brief Uriverse supports the following features:

• faceted searching through Solr and Lucene
• content rating and recommendation through the FiveStar module
• taxonomy
• pretty themes
• multiple languages
• integration with Google Maps through Geo module
• timelines through the Simile module
• commenting and moderation

More info can be obtained at Uriverse.

Cruncht is proud to announce the release of Uriverse and looks forward to adding new features over time.

Cruncht maintains the topicmap.com website which is a portal and blog for all things concerned with topic maps. It has been running for 10 years now and has traced the development of the topic maps community.

Over that time it has been through a number of iterations in its platform. It started out as a simple, static HTML site, then it moved to the Blogger hosted service, then to WordPress and now finally to Drupal. At each stage it became easier to manage and more functional.

The move to WordPress was a vast improvement over what was possible before. WordPress offers a lot of readily available functionality from the get go, providing a complete product which makes blogging and simple sites a breeze. WordPress also has a very healthy theming community which means that there is a wide variety of designs available to websites. However, there are some limitations if your requirements extend beyond what is required for simpler sites.

topicmap.com had a number of requirements which didn’t map so well to the WordPress way of doing things:

• a variety of content types
• relationships which extend beyond categorization
• filtering content by facets
• exposure to the semantic web.

All of these new requirements were possible with Drupal so the switch was made. I wouldn’t say that the move was easy. Drupal requires quite a bit more setup than WordPress, however, the effort is worth it for the flexibility you gain.

Enjoy the new topicmap.com website.