It was a lot of work and the IKS related open-source communities did a great job. Today we can announce the next major IKS release which is 6.0.
Get IKS 6.0
The IKS 6.0 release can be downloaded from our Google Code project web site:
http://code.google.com/p/iks-project/
To get started you have to download the release bundle ZIP and unpack it to your hard drive. To start IKS 6.0 you need Java version 1.6 or later. You have to execute the following command:
java -Xmx1024m -jar iks-6.0-launcher.jar
Then open a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080. You will see the IKS start page with links to documentation and the released components.
Some Highlights
It is not so easy to highlight the improvements of this release in a few sentences because everything was improved. We have touched every component, refactored source code, added or improved features, and added more tests to increase the code quality. One prominent improvement was the integration of the LD Path component into Apache Stanbol.
LD Path is a simple path-based query language similar to XPath or SPARQL Property Paths that is particularly well-suited for querying and retrieving resources from the Linked Data Cloud by following RDF links between resources and servers.
We can now use LD Path in Apache Stanbol which makes it easier to formulate queries for semantic enhanced content.
To get an overview how to use and integrate the IKS stack into your CMS, we have documented a set of service integration patterns that try to describe on a high level what the IKS can be used for. The complete list of these patterns is also part of the release documentation included in the release package.
As an example we have a look at three service integration patterns. The first one is related to using the VIE component to implement semantic user interface features.
| Name | Retrieve related content |
|---|---|
| Scenario | You want to include the retrieval of related content (e.g., images, news articles) based on the semantic information. |
| Used Components |
|
| Integration Work | Include VIE and the VIE widget in the source of the HTML file. Depending on the used vocabulary, a mapping of the semantic information to the related service queries needs to be implemented. |
The second one uses Apache Stanbol to extract entities which are defined in a custom vocabulary from textual content.
| Name | Extract entities known from a custom vocabulary |
|---|---|
| Scenario | You want to extract entities of custom types. These entities are defined by a custom vocabulary. |
| Used Components |
|
| Integration Work | You have to define your custom vocabulary that is used by the Keyword Linking Engine. |
The third examples can be used to implement a semantic storage and search feature based on Apache Stanbol.
| Name | Semantic storage and search |
|---|---|
| Scenario | You want to populate your semantic index which was created previously through an LDPath program. The semantic index can be populated with the information obtained by querying the named entities that have been detected for the content item with the corresponding LDPath program. |
| Used Components |
|
| Integration Work | You need to create an index to store your content items. |
According to our roadmap the IKS 6.0 release is intended to be based on the graduation release for Apache Stanbol. The graduation process is not triggered yet but Apache Stanbol has its first release candidate in the pipeline. Therefore, the IKS 6.0 is based on a first release candidate of Apache Stanbol.
To explore the full power of the IKS 6.0 release, we encourage to read its documentation and start to work with it. A have look at the Get Started section of the documentation.
You should visit the web-sites of the included open-source components and get in touch with the developers. Write an e-mail to the according mailing lists of VIE and/or Apache Stanbol, give feedback, ask questions. We are looking forward to hear from you!