Documentation

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Revision as of 18:28, 17 May 2012

This page collects Wandora documentation. Documentation is a work in progress and incomplete. Also note some documentation may be out of date as the application is developed intensely. If you need specific help, leave a question in the discussion forum. Additional help may be available on wandoratv. If you would like to edit this wiki, send an email to support character.gif wandora.org with your name and information about how you'd like to contribute. Remember to add keyword WANDORA to the title of your email.


Contents

Introduction

Wandora is a general purpose information management application. Wandora is written in Java programming language. Wandora's internal data model is based on Topic Maps. Wandora is a desktop application with a graphical user interface, layered data storage, huge collection of data extraction, import and export options and embedded HTTP server. Wandora's license is GNU GPL version 3.

Starting with Wandora

Wandora is a desktop application written in Java version 6. You need Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to execute the application. Wandora has two distribution packages. Binary distribution package contains runnable version of the application. Wandora's source code is available as a source code distribution package. Both packages are zip compressed file repositories. Use one of the startup scripts in bin folder to run Wandora application. Wandora project is developed with Netbeans IDE. Source code distribution package contains a Netbeans IDE project.

Topic Maps

Wandora's internal datamodel is based on Topic Maps. Wikipedia defines Topic Maps as a standard for the representation and interchange of knowledge, with an emphasis on the findability of information. A topic map represents information using topics, associations and occurrences. Topic represents any concept, from people, countries, and organizations to software modules, individual files, and events. Association representing hypergraph relationships between topics. And occurrence is an information resource relevant to a particular topic. Wandora's topic map model is limited. These model limitations are explained in Topic maps in Wandora page.

See also Topic map layers section below.

Using Wandora

This section contains some basic tutorials for Wandora. If you are a novice Wandora user, please start here. See also tutorial videos on wandoratv.

Editing topics

Wandora has a rich set of topic, association and occurrence editing features. Wandora user may edit single topic in a topic panel. Modifying an association takes place in separate dialog window, association editor. Similarly, modifying an occurrence takes place in a separate editor. See also tutorial videos on wandoratv.

Topic panels

Topic panel is Wandora's UI element to view and edit topics. Wandora supports several different topic panel types. Topic panel type is changed with menu options in View > Topic panels. Traditional topic panel views all topic elements in a table while tabbed panel views topic details in separate tabs. Graph topic panel is used for graph visualizations. Custom topic panel is based on user specific queries related to the current topic.

Topic map layers

Wandora supports layered topic maps. Layered topic map contains one or more topic maps stacked into an ordered array. Wandora views all layered topic maps as a single topic map but allows layer specific operations too. It really matters what layer is active. As user can focus on one layer at a time or replace any layer at any time, the composition of information is flexible. User can easily try different scenarios. Layer specific application options and tools locate in Layers menu.

Different layer types

Other

Import and Export

Wandora has been designed for easy aggregation of information and features a wide range of import and export tools. Wandora imports not just different Topic Maps formats such as XTM1, XTM2, and LTM but also RDF as XML, N3, and Turtle. Also, Wandora imports bio-ontologies in OBO flat file format. To get an up-to-date overview of Wandora's import options see menu File > Import. Addition to import options, Wandora features a wide range of export options from different Topic Maps formats to different graph formats. See menu options in File > Export. Wandora's native file format is Wandora project, with a file suffix WPR, which is a collection of XTM2 topic maps and a configuration file within a zip package.

Graph and matrix imports

Graph and matrix exports

For additional information about Wandora's export capabilities see also Wandora Server and CMS bridges section below. For additional information about Wandora's import capabilities see also Extractors section below.

Extractors

Wandora is great for information mashups. With Wandora you can easily mashup information from various sources. Extractors are specific Wandora tools used to extract topics and associations out of different file formats and sources. For example, Wandora can extract data from MP3 and JPG files. To see what extractors your Wandora has installed see menu options in File > Extract. To start an extractor select the extractor in the menu or use drag and drop extractor. Wandora also features an add-on for Mozilla Firefox WWW browser. With this add-on you can perform extractions directly in Firefox www browser or in Thunderbird email client.

Search engine extractors

Simple files extractors

Media extractors

Social and Bookmark extractors

Bibliographical extractors

Classifications

Knowledge extractors

HTML structures extractors

News and syndication extractors

Microformat extractors

Wiki extractors

Simple RDF extractors

Language

Databases

Other

See Refining occurrences for some practical examples of how to extract associations and topics out of occurrences.

Generators

Generators are special tools that generate topics and associations algorithmically. Generators help you construct basic building blocks for your topic maps. Generators are also a nice test suite for Wandora and topic maps in general. Generators locate in Wandora's File > Generate menu. Available generators are

Schema

Schema is a collection of specific topics and associations that Wandora uses to construct the user interface of association editor, occurrence editor and topic name panel. Schema eases many topic map operations such as association and occurrence construction. Schema also defines the language support of Wandora application.

  • Schema to ease association and occurrence creation and modification

Language support

Wandora supports only one base name per topic. However, a topic may contain several different variant names. Each variant name has a type and a language. Similarly, a topic may contain several different occurrences, text fragments. Each occurrence has a type and a language also. Wandora supports both Microsoft Translator and Google translate API and can convert both variant names and occurrences to other languages.

Analyzing Topic Maps

Generally these tools locate in Layers > Statistics menu. As an exception SOM classifier is found in association table menu and topic map comparison in File menu. Wandora provides also a bridge to R language. R language is a comprehensive statistical and graphing environment. With Wandora's R integration, the user can access Wandora's information structures in R environment. This opens up interesting possibilities if used together with information extractors.

Tools and tool manager

Almost every feature in Wandora is implemented with a tool. Tool packs certain Wandora functionality into a single software component. Wandora's user may customize the available tool set and even add third party tools to Wandora.

Wandora as a server

Wandora application contains an HTTP server. Embedded HTTP server generates various output formats out of information stored in Wandora. For example, HTML service module generates HTML pages out of topics in Wandora.

Wandora team has also built several service modules for Drupal content management system and an extra for Joomla content management system. These modules can be used to publish Wandora stored information in these CMSes.

Wandora's embedded HTTP server contains a service module for SOAP web service. There is additional information available for Wandora's web service.

For additional information, see also Export section above.

Miscellaneous documentation

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