We are excited to announce the release of metaphactory 4.7 which comes with a new, end-to-end visual instance authoring solution, as well as multiple other extensions and improvements to ontology modeling, vocabulary management, user permission management, and the user experience.

Visual instance authoring

metaphactory's new visual instance authoring interface allows end users to create, edit and connect instance data entities using metaphactory's interactive graph component. This alternative to metaphactory’s semantic forms supports a visual and more contextualized authoring process, as it allows users to explore entities’ network and context before connecting them and creating new relations directly on the canvas. The goal here is to empower users to capture knowledge using connections between data points - driven by dependencies in the underlying semantic model - in an efficient and scalable way. This is particularly useful when dealing with large knowledge graphs.

Additionally, the end-to-end visual instance authoring solution supports workflow-like use cases, where users need to create and map entities in a step-by-step manner following the underlying semantic model. The logically ordered instantiation and interlinking of resources directly on the canvas helps increase efficiency, reduce errors, and decrease the time needed for creating new instance data. Properties of existing entities can also be modified directly from the graph component canvas, without having to navigate away to an authoring form.

Finally, the visual instance authoring solution can also provide a more intuitive way to author vocabularies, for example where more than one hierarchy is needed (e.g., a broader/narrower hierarchy plus a functional hierarchy), where hierarchies are more complex, or when aligning different vocabularies with each other.

Other extensions and improvements in metaphactory 4.7

• Extensions to ontology modeling & vocabulary management
  • Concurrent editing of ontologies through the ability to temporarily lock assets and prevent other users from overwriting changes
  • Extended versioning and governance processes through support for knowledge graph asset management with multiple Git repositories or branches. This includes the ability to define one ontology per repository and assign appropriate permissions on the Git repository level.
  • Support for relations with multiple domains and ranges (qualified value shapes), incl. in semantic forms and the visual instance authoring interface
  • Improved readability/contrast for ontology visualization
• Improvements to the documentation and management of users permissions, incl. concise descriptions of user roles and the option for application engineers to see which UI components are affected by specific user roles
• RDF publishing, with the ability to publish resources with stable, resolvable IRIs and to configure the subgraph for an RDF resource to be returned through template queries
• Improved GraphDB integration, incl. OIDC/JWT token authentication and authorization for impersonation of users from metaphactory all the way to GraphDB, improved integration with GraphDB connectors for semantic search
• Improvements to the user experience, incl. the ability to persist the state of semantic tables in the browser and usability improvements to the vocabulary editor