Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
For building SeamGUI and SeamPRES, the two flagship client-applications of
SEAMLESS-IF, Adobe Flex
6
has been selected as the most usable technology.
It offers declarative user interface programming with a rich library of professional
and functional components. Code is compiled and runs in a Flash virtual machine
(inside a web browser). Protocols for data exchange (pull, server push and data
binding) with a server are included. Since a Flex application basically is deployed as
a Flash application running within a web browser it is easy to create GUI mock-ups
and distribute them to get feedback. This process helped a lot in clarifying the
end-user requirements. End-users could easily access the client application and
provide with their feedback on design and usability issues.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that web based clients use extensively the Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS) standard whenever possible to allow future synchronization
(or changes) of look and feel.
The SEAMLESS Knowledge Manager
The SEAMLESS Knowledge Manager has been developed as part of the Thinklab
platform, as an open source project
7
for accessing and managing ontologies. It is
built upon the Protege-OWL libraries, and has been designed using the Java Plug-in
Framework approach (Villa
2005)
.
The SEAMLESS Domain Manager, a plug-in part of the Knowledge Manager,
is a tool for delivering Java objects that are used by models and tools for exchanging
information. The SEAMLESS Domain Manager uses Thinklab core infrastructure
for accessing ontologies and following the domain class principle, it may:
1. Generate domain classes from ontology;
2. Access domain objects at runtime (by using EJB/Hibernate).
The Domain Manager plug-in of the Knowledge Manager (Villa
2005
; Rizzoli
et al.
2007a, b
; Athanasiadis and Janssen
2008)
provides in this way the service
for persistently storing generated classes using the EJB/Hibernate technology
(
www.hibernate.org
)
. Through Hibernate a relational database may store (and retrieve)
populated Java objects. In this sense, the Domain Manager is the 'knowledge
processing' component of SeamFrame, providing access to and modification of
SEAMLESS data, through the ontology-specified interfaces (Fig.
9.6
).
Fetching data from the Knowledge Base actually means to retrieve data from a rela-
tional database (the SEAMLESS database), using information provided by Hibernate.
8
7
http://www.integratedmodelling.org
.
Terms of use are defined by the General Public Licence
