[Zope] Re: topic maps

[Arnar Lundesgaard]

Sébastien Georget wrote:

> Hi,

Hi,

I apologize for the late answer, I didn't notice your post until now.

>    what are the tools to play with topic maps under zope (or python) ?
> I saw a ztm project on sourceforge, but there is nothing to download, is
> it a dead project ?

Not at all. We haven't updated the code on sourceforge since last November,
but ZTM is definately not dead.

OTOH, it hasn't really been alive as an open source project. ZTM is
currently developed and maintained by a Norwegian consulting company called
Creuna, and is in production for 8 web portals of various sizes (some
fairly high-profile).

We would like to maintain it as an open source project, but we have not had
the necessarry resources available to get it going. Nor has the project
been announced properly to the Zope community (although it has been known
in the Topic Maps community).

The reason for this is that the install procedure has been "involved" and
undocumented. We really want to make it easy to install before properly
announcing it.

An easy to install distribution has not yet been commercially needed by
Creuna, so we have focused on developing advanced new functionality on top
of ZTM (which is much cooler than making a distribution :-). All directly
open source related work has been relegated to the spare time of the core
developers and given other interests this has not been very often.

This has pretty much been the situation for the last year. We have made
great advances in the capabilities and scalability of the platform, but not
on the open source side.


I am currently refactoring and cleaning up the codebase with the goal of
making it easier to install and make a distribution. Not much work remains,
but don't hold your breath. 

The long term goal for ZTM2 is some form of integration with Plone (if
feasable).

  http://plone.org/development/current/roadmap
  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.zope.plone.educational/54

For Zope 3 we will build ZTM3.


If you have any other questions or would like to see the latest code, I
usually hang out on freenode in the #zope channel. My nick is 'arnarl'


  Arnar Lundesgaard

PS: The only other Zope based TopicMap project I am aware of is Gnowsys
which is not based on CMF like ZTM is.