ARNotations

ARNotations is a Ruby on Rails plugin to map any kind of ActiveRecord model to a Topic Map Fragment, providing the ability to expose them TMExplore compatible using REST.

Dependencies

Currently ARNotations depends on the libxml gem.

Installation

If you are using ruby, please install "libxml-ruby" or "libxml-jruby" if you use JRuby. For Rails 2.x use script/plugin install git://github.com/tmlab/ARNotations.git to install in your current Rails Application. For actually arnotating your Application have a look at the examples provided.

Example

Some examples how to "arnotate" your model: Give some typical ActiveRecord class like:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
   validates_presence_of :firstname, :lastname, :identifier
   has_and_belongs_to_many :publications, :class_name => 'Publication', :join_table => :authors_publications
   translates :description
end

You would simply add:

...for things that should be represented as Topic Names

 has_name  :lastname, :psi => "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/familyName"
 has_name  :firstname , :psi => "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/givenName"

...for things that should be represented as Topic Occurrences

 has_occurrence :description

...for associations

 has_association :publications,
    {:name => "authorship", :psi => "http://psi.topicmapslab.de/tml/authorship"},
    {:name => "has author", :psi => "http://psi.topicmapslab.de/tml/work"},
    {:name => "is author of", :psi => "http://psi.topicmapslab.de/tml/author"}

to your model. In your controller e.g. the PeopleController add format.xtm {render :xml => @person.to_xtm2} to your show Method, and format.xtm {"render :xml => @people = Person.all.to_xtm2 } to your index Method, and given you use the default RoR routing (with .:format) or request content type "application/xtm+xml" those Methods will return you some nice explorable Topic Map fragments.

Copyright (c) 2010 Daniel Exner exner@informatik.uni-leipzig.de, released under the MIT license