This is the first attempt to describe the Rhizomer installation process and functionality, work in progress...
Download and Install
The application plus the required libraries is available as a WAR file from the project downloads page and the last version of the source code from the SVN repository. The SVN contains the development version but the downloads aren't quite stable either for the moment...
In principle, it can be installed in any servlet/jsp container. However, It has been just tested with Tomcat. If placed in the Tomcat's webapps folder, it should be automatically expanded and installed as and application available from /rhizomer (typically http://localhost:8080/rhizomer).
If installed elsewhere, you should just adjust the path to the users.xml file in the META-INF/context.xml file, currently "webapps/rhizomer/META-INF/users.xml". There is just one default user named "rhizomer" with password "rhizomer".
Functionality
If you go now to the installed Rhizomer homepage, you will see almost the same content that is available from the running example at http://rhizomik.net. However, the semantic metadata used is locally stored as a file and loaded at start time from metadata/rhizomikstore.rdf
You can change it or configure a different file to load RDF from changing the WEB-INF/web.xml file. The Rhizomer servlet parameters specify if the RDF metadata is loaded/stored from a file (by defining folder and file name) or from a database (there are all the typical parameters for MySQL though other databases can be also used as long as they are compatible with Jena, the RDF store currently supported).
Apart from the example metadata and content, there are also two RSS items that are shown from the homepage, at the left. These are RSS items described using RDF which are rendered as HTML tables. You can browse from them but also display them on a map (because they have geo coordinates) or in a timeline (because they have date or dtstart/dtend).
It is also possible to edit RDF metadata by clicking the small "edit" links that appear at the top of each table rendering a piece of RDF. This shows a form that allows editing that piece of RDF, or creating a new one based on it. In the latter case a new URI for the new resource should be provided.
Currently, it is not possible to add new properties. We are also working on search forms dynamically generated from the kind of resource the user is interested in, RDFa, new interaction/visualisation plugins in addition to timeline and map,...
It is also possible to manage HTML content following a wiki-style. Existing pages can be edited using the "edit" link that appears at the top left corner of the "HTML" tab. It is also possible to create new HTML pages just by typing a non-existing URL in the context of the rhizomer application. Then, you can start editing it, e.g. http://localhost:8080/rhizomer/test/
For a deeper description of Rhizomer functionality from the point of view of the tasks that users can perform, see the Rhizomer Howto
Running Examples
There are some running examples of Rhizomer that use different metadata sets and layouts. Apart from the http://rhizomik.net site, there is also a prototype for media management at http://rhizomik.net/s5t. This project also shows a new visualisation service called play that allows playing audio and navigating an audio transcription semantically annotated (just the first audio item, not the second one).
This example also shows that Rhizomer can be used in order to navigate the linked data web. If you click "Lleida" in the transcription you go to DBPedia and can continue navigating through it (and showing resources in maps and timelines) from the Rhizomer interface. Finally, there is also http://rhizomik.net/semanticxbrl built on top of semantic metadata generated from XBRL files.
Feedback
Please, if you have any comment or issue, send them to us using the issues tracker.
