VocBench (and Semantic Turkey) 12.1 and ShowVoc 3.1 release: lot of news! compliancy with Java 17+, Spring 6, GraphDB 10.x
Armando Stellato
Dear all,
It’s a great day today. After a long wait, finally a new, major release of VocBench and ShowVoc has been made available.
It’s been a long journey, 5 months since the last fix/patch release and one entire year since the latest major release with new features.
This long wait had been necessary due to a major reengineering of the platform that was required to move on with compliancy to newer versions of some dependencies and, most important, with more up-to-date versions of Java beyond Java 8.
Here’s a list of the major architectural/compliancy changes:
- Java: VocBench and ShowVoc require now Java 17 (and have been tested successfully on Java 21)
- We abandoned OSGi. The plugin framework has now been implemented through PF4J (https://pf4j.org/). We kept as much as possible of the upper layers of the whole plugin framework in Semantic Turkey, so updating your third-party extensions will take little or no effort.
- As a consequence of moving away from OSGi, we abandoned the Karaf container. Semantic Turkey, the backed platform behind both VB and SV, is now run through Spring Boot
- Spring: move from 3 to 6
- RDF4J: move from 3 to 4
- GraphDB: move from GDB 9 to 10
The release numbers are 12.1 (VB) and 3.1 (SV) so, apparently, a minor version. However, we never publicly released versions 12.0/3.0, which underwent strong testing within a strict circle of stakeholders. In the meanwhile, we were conducting tests on data migration concerning GraphDB.
About this, all members of the VocBench/ShowVoc team want to express their gratitude to Ontotext (https://www.ontotext.com/) for closely collaborating on obtaining a seamless data migration of GraphDB (https://www.ontotext.com/products/graphdb/) repositories from version 9.x to 10.x, supporting all of VocBench plugins and sails.
So, version 12.1 of VocBench and 3.1 of ShowVoc have been released today, and are available at the following pages:
VocBench: http://vocbench.uniroma2.it/downloads/
ShowVoc: http://showvoc.uniroma2.it/downloads/
GraphDB and RDF4J compliancy:
VocBench sports internally RDF4J 4.3.6, which is used both for locally managed repositories and for connecting, as a client, to external triple stores.
VocBench 3 12.1 has been extensively tested with GraphDB 10.6.2, which is also the version currently distributed by Ontotext. It is necessary to use this version and no less than that.
You can find more about connection to external triple stores in our installation docs: http://vocbench.uniroma2.it/doc/sys/#separate_triple_store
The GraphDB indexing plugin adopted by VocBench is no more embedded into GDB, it needs to be deployed manually into the plugins directory of the triple store.
This is available for download here:
https://bitbucket.org/art-uniroma2/semantic-turkey/downloads/lucene-fts-plugin-graphdb-plugin.zip
Release notes
Release notes are reported below for the two applications, for their common service backend and for its main related applications. We put together here the release notes of 12.0/12.1 for VocBench/Semantic Turkey and of versions 3.0/3.1 for ShowVoc.
SemanticTurkey 12.0 and 12.1
* major re-engineering of the architecture, abandoning OSGi (which limited compatibility
to Spring 3.x, via SpringDM) reimplementing plugin management through the PF4J plugin
framework (https://pf4j.org/) and updating Spring dependency to version 6
* abandoned the Karaf OSGi container, adopting Spring Boot for application containment
* following the above, updates of most third-party dependencies have been performed
* updated dependency of RDF4J to v4.3.6 and introduced support for GraphDB 10.x
- now indexing of GDB repositories requires an external component, the Lucene FTS plugin
(https://bitbucket.org/art-uniroma2/semantic-turkey/downloads/lucene-fts-plugin.zip)
* added support for validation with Custom View single value based on property chain
* fixed the problem with some symbols during the globalSearch in ShowVoc services
* changed the default format for the data dumps returned by ShowVoc from Turtle to RDF/XML
* skip validation on SHACL shapes-related update operations (i.e., load shape, clear shape), if validation is enabled
* lazy resolution of the support repository associated with the Change Tracker sail. This fixes the problem with
GraphDB that keeps hanging when restarting a repository that contains the change tracker sail.
* introduced the SDMXExporter, a Reformatting Exporter for the SDMX format (for statistical classifications)
* added a configuration option to the trivial inferencer to completely disable it after installation into a repository
* added services to later disable trivial inference in a project where it is set up
* updated the connector for data.europa.eu which was no longer able to retrieve the details
of a dataset
* modified the distribution to log to file by default, except for errors which are also
logged to the console
* added the possibility, in GlobalSearch, to specify, as searchMode one of:
startsWith, contains, endsWith or exact
* fixed bug concerning missing converters at the level of core framework
* fixed bug concerning the creation of the repositories on GraphDB with the old
configuration namespace.
* add support for configuring FTS indexes, which are not used by Semantic Turkey
* fixed bug in trivial inferencer due to incompatibility with sails such as the SHACL one,
by moving materialization of trivial inferences an flushUpdates() method invoked by flush()
* fixed a bug preventing non-logged users to download the data dumps returned by the ShowVoc connectors
* fixed a bug in projects with Validation, where a clear on a specific graph is interpreted as a clear all if
validation was temporarily disabled (per connection)
* changed shebang in shell scripts to avoid dependency on Bash (which is not available in Alpine containers)
* updated dependency on Spring Boot 3.2.0
* updated dependency on PF4J 3.10.0
* updated dependency on CODA 2.0.1
* updated dependency on Sheet2RDF 6.0.5
* updated dependency on lime-api 0.4.5
* updated dependency on maple 0.0.15
* required Java 17
* minor bugfixes and improvements
VocBench Web App 12.0 and 12.1
* Renamed EDOAL model to Alignment
* Supported validation in single value property chainin in Custom Views
* Supported editing of alignments with arbitrary properties (in Alignment projects)
* Better support for navigating through the alignments through the keyboard
* Restored line-through style for staging-deleted triples
* Added possibility to resize the main panels in the alignment validation (from remote system) page
* Improved ICVs browsing: now the list of available ICVs is always visible in a left sidebar
* Added possibility to dynamically disable/enable trivial inference
* General improvements to keyboard navigation support
* Fixed performance degradation issue due to the improper usage of setInterval method. Thanks to Saku Seppälä for the contribution.
* Minor UI improvements and bugfixes
ShowVoc Web App 3.0 and 3.1
* Enabled hyperlinks in dataset descriptions
* Added option "open at startup" to datasets administration
* Fixed a bug that prevented to access properties in Data page through direct links
* Added possibility to expand/collapse datasets groups in Datasets page when facet-based visualization mode is enabled
* Added possibility to mark datasets as favorites
* Enabled datasets restriction and search settings customizations to Global Search
* Added possibility to configure the Rendering Engine
* Enabled possibility to choose between resource ordering by URI or Rendering in trees and lists
* Introduced navigation of ResourceView based on tabs (through combination of CTRL+click or double clicks)
* Implemented Custom Sections in ResourceView
* Added possibility to customize the default template of a ResourceView
* Added possibility to customize style of clickable values in ResourceView
* Implemented sections filter and enabled the possibility to explicitly show sections' headers in Resource View
* Enabled dereferenceability of foreign values in ResourceView
* Added the display of value datatypes in ResourceView
* Enabled export of alignment mappings
* Included alignments mappings to download distribution
* Added possibility to expand/collapse results in Translation page
* Enabled creation of users with the possibility to be assigned as manager to a dataset
* Added possibility for administrator/PM to set a default schemes selection for a given project
* Added possibility for user to set a default rendering languages selection
* reorganization of buttons/options for the graph views
* Major refactoring of settings management
* Fixed issue that allowed visitors to delete stored configuration
Sheet2RDF 6.0.2-6.0.5
* fixed minor issue in serialization of Coda Converter arguments in Pearl
* fixed bug when using PostgreSQL
* enabled reading of content in cells with formula in Excel
* updated dependency on RDF4J to version 4.3.6
* updated dependency on CODA to version 2.0.1
* update dependency on PostgreSQL to version 42.7.2
* require Java 17
CODA 2.0.1
* migration from OSGi to Plugin Framework for Java (PF4J)
* require Java 17
* update dependency on RDF4J to version 4.3.3
* update dependency on UIMA to version 3.4.1
* various dependency updates
Migration from a previous version of the system
As usual, for people migrating from a previous version of VocBench 3 / ShowVoc, it suffices to:
- keep the “SemanticTurkeyData” directory (you might want to make a backup just in case anything happens, even though the system has been extensively tested for migration)
- consider that some migration routines will make the data directory not entirely compatible with prior versions of VocBench
- remove the previous distribution (directory semanticturkey-x.y) and replace it with the new one inside the vocbench3-12.1-full.zip (or equivalent of ShowVoc) archive
- if using an external triple store:
- before moving/running anything, pls backup your data!!!
- as you will be most probably change triple store version (from 9.x to 10.6.2 of graphdb or from 3.x to 4.x of RDF4J), you will need to move to the data directory within the previous installation of the triplestore into the new installation with the updated version of the triplestore
- deploy the st-changetracking-sail-12.1.jar, that can be extracted from:
/semanticturkey-12.1.0/lib/st-changetracking-sail/12.1
into the lib directory of the triple store - deploy the st-trivial-inference-sail-12.1.jar, that can be extracted from:
/semanticturkey-12.1.0/lib/st-trivial-inference-sail/12.1
into the lib directory of the triple store - for GDB only, install the FTS plugin
https://bitbucket.org/art-uniroma2/semantic-turkey/downloads/lucene-fts-plugin-graphdb-plugin.zip
into the plugins directory of GDB (unzip it and place the contained directory within the plugins directory of GDB)
For developers willing to recompile the project:
all of the dependencies of VocBench based on other software written by us:
- semantic-turkey (12.1): http://semanticturkey.uniroma2.it/ https://bitbucket.org/art-uniroma2/semantic-turkey
- coda (2.0.1): http://art.uniroma2.it/coda/ https://bitbucket.org/art-uniroma2/coda
- sheet2rdf (6.0.5): http://art.uniroma2.it/sheet2rdf/ https://bitbucket.org/art-uniroma2/sheet2rdf
- maple (0.0.15): http://art.uniroma2.it/maple/ https://bitbucket.org/art-uniroma2/maple
- lime-api (0.4.5): http://art.uniroma2.it/lime/ https://bitbucket.org/art-uniroma2/lime-api
have already been committed to Maven Central, so they may choose what to re-build and what to take as-is from the dependencies
Cheers,
The VocBench/ShowVoc team
P.S: in the week from 25th of April to 1st of May a series of national/international holidays and a team retreat may take most of us away from emails. Apologies for slow response time in this period. We’ll be fully back on the 2nd of May!
Caracciolo, Caterina (ESS)
Caterina Caracciolo, PhD
Statistics Division (ESS) – FAO of the UN
https://www.fao.org/statistics/caliper/
Sent: Monday, April 22, 2024 5:49 PM
To: 'vocbench-user' <vocben...@googlegroups.com>; semantict...@googlegroups.com <semantict...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [vocbench-user] VocBench (and Semantic Turkey) 12.1 and ShowVoc 3.1 release: lot of news! compliancy with Java 17+, Spring 6, GraphDB 10.x
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Armando Stellato
Thanks Caterina!
Thanks for the appreciation and for the always valuable feedback on the systems!
Armando
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/vocbench-user/AS2PR05MB986399C072926CCF7F717971FB112%40AS2PR05MB9863.eurprd05.prod.outlook.com.