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The Pronto Ontology Repository
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This page describes the 'Pronoto' Ontology Repository
components that are being developed by the eResearch Group.
Overview
The Pronto ontology repository allows you to store and retrieve
ontologies and metadata about the ontologies. It keeps track of
who uploaded ontologies and in which versions and it allows
comparing different versions of one ontology.
The system is designed to work well in modern web browsers.
In particular it allows use of the back button and most pages
can be bookmarked, sent as link or rendered in a "printer
friendly" form.
More information on Pronto's purpose, functionality
and related work may be found via the side-bar of the
Pronto Demonstrator.
Implementation Technology
The Pronto Repository is implemented in a RESTful manner,
so that browser features such as bookmarking, the back button,
multiple open pages and so on work as expected. It uses
JavaScript and CSS to provide a more dynamic and better
user experience while avoiding the non-RESTful approach
of having too much state on the client side.
On the client side HTML and CSS are used in a way that
is compatible with most modern browsers. The dynamic parts
of the user interface rely on existing JavaScript libraries:
e.g. Dojo and Dijit for general scripting and GUI components,
and Exhibit for the dynamic browse display.
The Pronto backend is based on a modern Java stack. Metadata is
persisted in a relational database using JPA and
validation annotations with Hibernate. The Lucene search
engine is used for full-text search of Ontologies. The
Pronto web pages are delivered using the Restlet framework
and engine, an pages are rendered using Freemarker templates.
Aspects such as persistence management, authentication /
authorization, and the addressing of security issues (e.g.
cross-site-scripting vulnaribilities) are implemented by
an framework build on top of these tools.
Availability
The Pronto software is available under GPL-3 from the
SVN repository for the SourceForge metadata-net project. No downloadable
distribution is available yet. A Pronto demonstrator may be
found at
this page.
Contact
For more information about this software, please contact
pbecker at itee.uq.edu.au.
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