AceWiki

Copyright 2008-2012, AceWiki developers.

AceWiki is a semantic wiki based on controlled natural language.

Website: http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/acewiki/

Developers

These are the AceWiki developers:

• Tobias Kuhn (since 2006)
• Kaarel Kaljurand (since 2011)
• Yu Changyuan (since 2011)

Institutions

The following institutions are or were involved in the development of AceWiki:

• Technical University Dresden, Germany (2006)
• University of Zurich, Switzerland (since 2006)
• University of Chile (2010)
• University of Malta (2011)
• University of Gothenburg, Sweden (since 2011)
• University of Helsinki, Finland (2011)

Repository

AceWiki is hosted on GitHub (repository and bug tracking): https://github.com/AceWiki/AceWiki

The downloads can be found here: https://github.com/AceWiki/AceWiki/downloads

Previously, Launchpad was used instead of GitHub. Old packages and old bug reports can still be found there: https://launchpad.net/acewiki

License

AceWiki is free software licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (see licenses/gpl-3.txt and http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html).

See lib/README.txt for information about the used third-party libraries.

Content

This package contains the semantic wiki AceWiki and the ACE Editor, which is a general-purpose editor with support for predictive text editing. Both tools rely on the language ACE, which is a controlled natural language, concretely a subset of natural English. See http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/ for more information about ACE.

The code for AceWiki and the ACE Editor is divided into four jar-files:

• attempto-echo.jar contains basic GUI components and a predictive editor.
• attempto-chartparser.jar contains a chart parser (concretely an Earley parser).
• attempto-acewiki.jar contains the AceWiki application.
• attempto-aceeditor.jar contains the ACE Editor application.

See the Javadoc for the detailed documentation of the packages and classes.

The following picture shows the dependencies of the different Java packages (packages import only from lower packages):

  _______________________________
 |            acewiki            |
 |            ________           |
 |           |_aceowl_|          |
 |   _____    ________    ____   |
 |  |_gui_|  |__owl___|  |_gf_|  |
 |   _________________________   |
 |  |__________core___________|  |   ___________
 |_______________________________|  |_aceeditor_|
..................................................
                         _______________________
                        |_______preditor________|
  ___________________    _______________________
 |____chartparser____|  |_______echocomp________|
  ______________________________________________
 |____________________base______________________|

Compilation

You do not have to perform the steps described here if you are using a pre-compiled package (unless you change the source code).

Ant is required to manually run the compilation. Make sure that a recent version of Apache Ant is installed. The following commands are available:

• ant compile compiles the Java source code.
• ant createjars creates the jar-files.
• ant createjavadoc creates the Javadoc documentation pages.
• ant clean deletes all automatically generated files like the compiled Java classes, the jar-files, and the Javadoc files.
• ant buildeverything builds everything from scratch.

APE

AceWiki and the ACE Editor make use of APE, a parser that translates ACE into logic. In order to run APE, a recent version of SWI Prolog has to be installed and the file "ape.exe" has to be available. The file "ape.exe" can be complied from the APE package that can be obtained on the Attempto download page: http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/downloads/

Furthermore, you have to use the following Java VM argument that points to the location where the SWI Prolog library libjpl.jnilib (under Mac OS X), jpl.dll (under Windows), or libjpl.so (under Linux) is located. For example:

-Djava.library.path="/usr/lib/pl-5.8.3/lib/i386-linux"

The jpl.jar file is no longer part of the AceWiki package. You have to refer to the file of your SWI Prolog installation and include it in the Java classpath (something like /usr/lib/pl-5.8.3/lib/jpl.jar).

Under Linux, the environment variable LD_PRELOAD has to be set additionally to refer to the SWI Prolog library file:

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/pl-5.8.3/lib/i386-linux/libjpl.so

Java

Under some circumstances, the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH has to be set. This can be done as follows:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/i386:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/i386/server:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Note that the exact paths are most probably different on your system. See also the script "run-webapps-with-jettyrunner.sh".

If AceWiki is run on a server without a graphical interface loaded, you should additionally use the following Java option:

-Djava.awt.headless=true

This prevents Java from trying to use graphical libraries that might not be available.

Web Applications

AceWiki and the ACE Editor are web applications that have to be run as Java servlets. In order to build the war-file from the AceWiki sources, you have to run the following Ant command:

ant createwebapps

Executing this command will create the web application file "acewiki.war" and generate some files in the folder "webapps", which contains the uncompressed content of the archive. You should have a look at the following two files and change them if required:

war/WEB-INF/web.xml
war/index.html

After changing the files you should again run the "createwebapps"-command to update the war-file.

In order to run the war-file, a servlet container like Jetty or Apache Tomcat is needed. You have to make sure that the Java VM parameter "java.library.path" is set and points to the path of the SWI Prolog JPL library, as explained above.

Probably the easiest way to run the war-file is using Jetty Runner. The jar-file containing Jetty Runner can be downloaded from this repository:

http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/maven2/org/mortbay/jetty/jetty-runner/

Using Jetty Runner, the web applications can be started with

java -Djava.library.path=LIBJPLPATH -jar jetty-runner.jar --jar JPLJAR acewiki.war

where LIBJPLPATH is the path of the SWI Prolog JPL library and JPLJAR refers to the jpl.jar file. Alternatively, you can use the script "run-webapps-with-jettyrunner.sh".

AceWiki Data

The AceWiki data is stored on the server in a directory called "data" (unless specified otherwise in the web.xml file). Each AceWiki instance gets its own subdirectory therein. In order to import an AceWiki data file "*.acewikidata", this file needs to have the name of the ontology into which it should be imported (as defined by the web.xml file) and needs to be located in the "data" directory. Furthermore, the AceWiki data file is only loaded if no subdirectory with the respective ontology name exists. Thus, if there already exists data, the respective directory has to be removed or renamed before an AceWiki data file can be imported.

Help

If you encounter problems, you can get help from the community. Bugs and problems should be reported to the AceWiki site on GitHub: https://github.com/AceWiki/AceWiki