Ceryle Blog

Okay, what am I doing right now? It's a typical 4:13am and I've spent the last couple of hours futzing with getting this blog up and running. I spent most of this afternoon finishing up the Xindice database handling, so that it's pretty transparent -- either you run it independently of the Ceryle GUI and have it running in the background all the time (by starting it up via Ceryle on the command line), or you run it on a per-session basis. Some of the things you think are going to be simple turn out to be difficult to do right, and there's no point in doing it half-way in software. It'll bite your ass in the end. Like internationalization. Ceryle is fully i18n'd, ready for localization (i.e., translation into any language -- translators welcome!).

Today, Robert Barta sent along a transformation of the ISO 15926 Lifecycle integration of process plant data including oil and gas production facilities ontology as an XTM file (showing only taxonomic relations), which I promptly visualized with Ceryle. I've worked out most of the bugs with the visualizer, but the editor code is getting stale. Tomorrow's schedule is to try to finish up the ontology editing features still necessary for delivery.

Now that the blog is up and running, it's off to bed.

Welcome to the Ceryle Blog!

This blog is devoted to information about the Ceryle Project. Ceryle is an authoring tool designed to assist writers in organizing their research materials and develop narratives. Ceryle includes a built-in XML database and a topic map-based ontology-driven organizer. It is delivered with a set of modifiable authoring ontologies, and includes an ontology visualizer and editor. (If you don't take the word "ontology" when applied to computers very seriously, don't worry.)

The project has been in development for about two years and will be entering a beta testing period soon. I'll be gradually including information about the project's status, providing links to documentation and tutorials, and compiling a FAQ. All this should eventually show up here, as well as on the Ceryle home page (which will be available soon).

Please note that I've been spending most of my time in research and development, not documentation, as this is part of my Ph.D. at the Knowledge Media Institute in Milton Keynes, UK. Documentation is seemingly always the last thing written, and I'd hate to rock the boat on this one.