We are excited to announce the release of metaphactory 5.6, which comes with exciting additions and extensions to its semantic modeling capabilities, model-driven application building logic and its conversational interface.

Enhancements to semantic modeling

Visual semantic modeling interface

With the release of version 5.6, metaphactory's visual semantic modeling interface supports disjunctions on relations. This means that the expressivity of metaphactory's visual modeling language has been increased to allow for defining relationships where the range can be two or more classes. This enhancement makes it easier to represent complex relations with greater flexibility and clarity. For example, users can now explicitly model using an or-relation that publications can have instances of the class Person or Organization as an author. metaphactory is the first semantic modeling platform that allows visual modeling of such compositions with a direct translation to SHACL for data validation and model-driven application building.

Additionally, vocabulary restrictions within the visual semantic modeling interface have been reworked. With an improved UX, it is now possible to restrict a class, for example, to instances from one or several managed vocabularies.

Vocabulary management

As part of this release, metaphactory's vocabulary management capabilities now include a clear editorial workflow to enhance vocabulary governance by facilitating collaboration, traceability and quality–similar to the existing ontology lifecycle management functionality in the platform. The vocabulary editorial workflows allow to clearly communicate a vocabulary's status (e.g., in development, in review, etc.) and are supplemented with the ability to request reviews, post review comments and lock in the respective states.

Furthermore, it is now possible to create versioned copies of vocabularies in metaphactory. This means that knowledge stewards can work on a new version of a vocabulary, while current or older versions are still maintained in the system.

Enhancements to model-driven application development

metaphactory 5.6 simplifies and streamlines the configuration of model-driven components, such as the semantic form, the visual data curation interface, and semantic search. In particular, it now provides a more unified approach for referencing a model in the configuration and improves consistency in how model information is computed. New modeling constructs such as disjunctions on relations are now supported as well and will be automatically reflected, for example, in model-driven forms.

Moreover, a new model-driven entity view component allows for rendering entity facts in a simplified and end-user friendly way. This will significantly reduce the effort of building and maintaining such views, by decreasing the need to boilerplate lengthy queries and HTML templates to render rather simple property-value views. This new feature can be combined with metaphactory’s model annotation capabilities to influence how information is presented (e.g., ordered) to end users. Model annotations were introduced as a beta feature with metaphactory 5.5 and received additional improvements as part of version 5.6.

Enhancement to conversational interface

metaphactory 5.5 delivered a beta version of a conversational interface utilizing LLMs and allowing users to lead contextual conversations with the knowledge graph. With metaphactory 5.6, the conversational interface–while still in beta state–was extended with new capabilities to interact with the graph and to retrieve relevant information to support a wider range of information needs, including a translation into structured queries as well as retrieval of unstructured content. This is made possible by making the services of metaphactory's semantic search capabilities available to the conversational interface.

The results rendered by the conversational interface to a user’s question are driven by data context and the user's intent. With metaphactory 5.6, results can be rendered in multiple formats and can incorporate verbalization and summarization, but also visualizations like tables, charts and timelines.

metaphactory 5.6 also delivers a number of UI/UX improvements to the conversational interface, such as the ability to explain results by providing transparency about the tools and services used to execute a query, a mechanism for end users to provide feedback on the interaction and the answer received, as well as various improvements to serve user requests more comprehensively.

Have a look at the release notes or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to learn more about this release.

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