Hannes Niederhausen presenting TMCLedit, Leipzig

In the open space sessions at TMRA 2008 Hannes Niederhausen, a member of the Topic Maps Lab, presented his thesis project, which he calls TMCLedit. This is essentially a graphical modelling tool based on the initial GTM level 1 proposal. His idea is that it will let users graphically model their ontologies, and be able to import and export them to TMCL.

As far as I could make out from his presentation TMCLedit is written in Java, using the Eclipse tools for graphical modelling. He uses his own internal object model for representing the ontology, and has not yet added import/export. In fact, the whole thing is very much a work in progress, which is why it was in the open space sessions.

Below is a screenshot Hannes sent me after the conference:

Screenshot

So far I think this looks exactly like the sort of tool people have been asking me for over and over again for the past eight years. (Just look at the comment on the the GTM level 1 proposal.) I'm really hoping to see this released at some point in the not-too-distant future, and to see people doing ontologies in this and then importing them into Ontopoly (and vice versa).

I also find it interesting to note the difference between this and GTMalpha. For some people it's obvious that this is what we need. For others it's obvious that what we need is something like GTMalpha. I guess that means we need both.