Wandora is a general purpose Topic Maps editor application with a vast collection of information extractors. Extractors enable Wandora user to aggregate information from various open data sources. In this hands-on tutorial participants are shown how to create and publish multidimensional information mashups with Wandora and open data sources such as GeoNames and YouTube.

1. Wandora Workshop
Grip Studios Interactive, Aki Kivelä
akivela@gripstudios.com
TMRA 2009 Tutorial
11.11.2009
(edited 10.2.2010)

2. Outline of Workshop
Getting started
What is Wandora?
Hands-on!
Trying Wandora's features
Creating Leipzig Mashup
 Dbpedia, Flickr, GeoNames, RSS, YouTube,
OpenCalais, AlchemyAPI etc.
 To make mashup creation smooth, get yourself an
accout for Flickr and YouTube at least
2

3. Wandora
First version in 2001
Indexing and publishing the digitized artwork
collection in The Museum of Contemporary Art
Kiasma
Further development along the years in
various projects
Finnish National Gallery Art Collections
online (2007)
33711 artworks (of which14638 with images)
>130000 topics and >500000 associations
3

4. KIASMART (2001)
Town Again (2005)
Finnish National Gallery
Collections (2007)
http://collection.fng.fi
4

5. Wandora
Special WWW publishing projects using
Topic Maps → General purpose Topic
Maps editor application
Important people: Marko Wallgren, Pasi
Hytönen, Olli Lyytinen, and Aki Kivelä
Grip Studios Interactive Oy
5

6. Wandora Today
Desktop Java (Swing) application
General purpose Topic Maps editor
Distributed under GPL License
Many specialized tools for data
importing and bulk processing
Embedded HTTP server
Still a work in progress!!
6

7. Wandora's Philosophy
Developer centric
Pragmatic
Always beta
Motto: Giving the information back to the
people!
7

8. Topic Maps in Wandora
Wandora uses a slightly reduced
version of topic maps.
Standard topic maps have some features not
supported in Wandora
Most important restrictions:
Only one base name,
Restrictions with scope usage,
Each association player must have a different role,
No reification
8

9. Getting Wandora
Requires Java Runtime Environment
(Java SE 6)
Download Wandora from
http://www.wandora.org
Unzip the package somewhere
Start Wandora.exe or one of the
startup scripts in bin folder
9

10. 10

11. Wandora Basics
Topic tree navigator on the left side
Customizable, can make several trees
Opened topic fills most of the screen
Double click on topics to open them
Type in fields to edit values
Use menus do other tasks
Right mouse button → Context menu
Layers at lower left corner
11

12. Merging in Topic Maps
Topic Maps specify clear topic merging
rules
If two topics have same subject locator,
subject identifier or same base name they
are the same topic
Makes it possible to merge several
topic maps into a larger topic map
Also need to be careful not to
accidentally merge topics!!!!!!
12

13. Topic Map Layers
In Wandora you can organize your data
in several topic maps arranged in a
layer stack
Keep different kinds of data separate
Manage data visibility
Data can come from different source
In the editor, and when publishing, the
layers will look like one big merged topic
map
13

14. Hands-on!
We're going to build a Leipzig themed
information mashup
Gather as much information as possible
using Wandora's extractors: Flickr,
YouTube, Dbpedia, etc.
Merge topics representing same subject
View results in Wandora and web browser
14

15. Hands-on!
Example raw XTMs for mashup are
available at
http://www.wandora.org/wandora/download/
other/tmra09/wandora_tutorial_leipzig.zip
15

16. Thank you for your participation
www.wandora.org
akivela@gripstudios.com
16