Dysnomia Explorations

Dysnomia Explorations

Abstract: Dysnomia will become lightweight portal-building tool for Scala Lift framework. It's layout data and content data is taken from RDF sources, it supports composite views (i.e. multiple rectangular fragments on the browser screen may have their separate data models and view templates), it supports facetted browse (i.e. specific search interface). Currently this project is being developed, so there are no downloadable stuff yet. This is named after a moon Dysnomia.

Here are some requirements (each will be tested separately; in the next phase they will be combined):

Layout related behaviors

1. Introducing a new view/template should not involve changing Scala files or web.xml configuration. Views are being built dynamically from layout data, and it is sufficient that the view by the name is located somewhere in the Tomcat server's file system or can be found in the Web.
2. If the layout data is underspecified (or the required view cannot be found), there are reasonable default values (that can be additionally configured by the user), so that the end-user always gets some view.
3. Composite views are possible - thus creating a larger view from a few smaller ones (including also multiple levels of hierarchy). Drawing composite view is done by some layout manager that is passed as a parameter to the parent view.
4. HTTP request parameters can be received and displayed in each view participating in the composite view hierarchy

1. Content model can be queried by Sparql. It is efficient - it uses "describe" call first to reduce the data to be queried.
2. If there are too many records, there is paging functionality.
3. SPARQL queries can be parametrized.