VIE.js

As previously announced on the IKS blog I’ve been recently working together with Stéphane Corlosquet on integrating the tools provided by the IKS project to do semantic content enhancements in Drupal as part of the IKS early adopter program.

The Interactive Knowledge Stack (IKS) project is an open source community which got funded by the EU to build an open and flexible technology platform for semantically enhanced Content Management Systems. Thanks to IKS, open source projects like Apache Stanbol, VIE.js or Create.js got started. While VIE.js and Create.js are already on their way to Drupal 8 via the Spark initiative, our focus was on integrating Apache Stanbol with Drupal 7. In short, Apache Stanbol is a java web application that leverages tools like Apache Solr, Apache Tika or Apache OpenNLP to provide a set of reusable components for semantic content management via RESTful web services. On the front-end side, VIE.js (“Vienna IKS Editables”) is the JavaScript library for implementing decoupled Content Management Systems and semantic interaction in web applications.

For leveraging Apache Stanbol with Drupal we send Drupal’s data over to Apache Stanbol’s EntityHub component for indexing, such that it is available to Apache Stanbol’s content enhancer. That means, we can use VIE widgets like annotate.js to send pieces of text over to Apache Stanbol for auto-linking content items indexed to Stanbol, which by default includes DBpedia entities, but could be easily extended by any source providing data in RDF. Next, the VIE autocomplete widget allows for easy tagging based upon entities indexed with Apache Stanbol - regardless of whether they come from DBPedia or from one of the Drupal sites your organization runs!