FAQ: TopBraid EDG – Vocabulary Management
Business FAQ
Discover how TopBraid EDG – Vocabulary Management can improve your enterprise’s data governance.
What can TopBraid EDG-VM do besides manage vocabularies?
TopBraid EDG-VM can put your managed vocabularies to work both by exporting them in a range of formats for other tools to import as well as through dynamic communication with other tools via a RESTful and GraphQL API. This lets it support search engines, Content Management Systems such as SharePoint, and other components of a Service Oriented Architecture that need to enrich content and search strings with semantic metadata.
What customization options are available?
Many new features can be added by reconfiguring the models used to drive the TopBraid EDG-VM application. Some configurations and customizations can be made directly in EDG by selecting available options. Others can be done with TopBraid Composer Maestro Edition, a copy of which is included with TopBraid EDG-VM. Configuration options are described in the Development Guide. Such more advanced configurations can be done by TopQuadrant as part of the consulting services that are typically included with an EDG-VM license or as part of additional services purchased separately. Many TopQuadrant customers have taken the appropriate training in TopBraid application development to learn how to make such customizations themselves.
Does TopBraid EDG-VM support popular vocabulary management standards and/or more specialized ones?
TopBraid EDG-VM is built on the W3C SKOS standard for the management of controlled vocabularies. Using EDG you can extend SKOS by incorporating properties from well-known standards such as Dublin Core as well as properties or classes custom-designed for your own needs. TopBraid EDG-VM also meets ISO-25964-1 Guidelines for thesaurus management software.
Is TopBraid EDG-VM available in a SaaS (Software as a Service) model?
TopBraid EDG-VM is not currently available as a hosted service, but we are considering this as an option for the future. The TopBraid EDG-VM package includes installation services to help you host it on your own hardware or on a cloud-based platform such as Amazon Web Services.
What's the difference between TopBraid EDG-VM and TopBraid Composer?
TopBraid Composer is a single-user tool that installs on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer to make it easier to work with RDFS and OWL models and instance data. TopBraid Composer Standard Edition provides visual editing and query of RDF data and models along with a choice of importers, and the Maestro Edition is a complete integrated development environment that adds more importers and the ability to quickly develop knowledge graph applications. Maestro includes built-in Jetty server for testing reports and services. It also includes a single user, not networked copy of TopBraid EDG for evaluation purposes.
TopBraid EDG is a web-based multi-user product. Like TopBraid Composer it lets you edit models and their associated instance data. Unlike TopBraid Composer it is a data governance solution with many specialized features for working with different types of asset collections, user interface targeted to data governance needs, pre-built imports, exports and reports, role-based access control, workflows and other collaboration tools that let a workgroup coordinate proposed changes and roll them out in a structured fashion. Every change made in EDG is tracked in an audit trail that captures its nature, who made it and when it was made. EDG also includes APIs for communication with other applications. A TopBraid EDG license includes a copy of TopBraid Composer Maestro Edition for use by a system administrator.
How can TopBraid EDG-VM enhance search?
TopBraid EDG-VM can enhance search strings with related information, such as providing data to convert a search for “Motrin” into a search for “Motrin OR Ibuprofen.” It can provide a search engine interface with data about broader, narrower, and related terms (or custom metadata designed for your enterprise’s needs), and it can also provide automated tagging tools with data to record such relationships to aid future searches. See Semantic Search for further information.
Does TopBraid EDG-VM manage both taxonomies and ontologies? What is the difference?
Taxonomies in EDG are datasets that contain concepts connected to each other using broader or narrower relationships. Concepts are described using SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) ontology and, if desired, user’s extensions to it. Ontologies in EDG define classes and properties – schema level information. TopBraid EDG-VM lets you create and manage any RDFS/OWL or SHACL ontology model. You can also create corresponding class instances directly in ontologies. However, you may want to consider using Data Graphs for managing instance data that is not based on SKOS.
Technical FAQ
Get answers to common questions about the technical integration of TopBraid EDG – Vocabulary Management to your system.
What operating systems is TopBraid EDG-VM available for?
Because EDG-VM is web-based, it can be used from any popular web browser under any operating system. See Supported Platforms for further details on this and the EDG-VM server platform.
How does TopBraid EDG-VM deal with authentication?
A typical TopBraid EDG-VM installation uses LDAP to handle authentication.
Does TopBraid EDG-VM integrate with the ______ tool?
If another tool has a documented API, it can usually work with the TopBraid EDG-VM API to cooperate as part of a Service Oriented Architecture.
How many terms and vocabularies can TopBraid EDG-VM store?
There are no built-in limits. TopQuadrant can work with you to help plan the right hardware infrastructure to support the scale of vocabulary management that you need.
Is there an API?
In addition to providing a SPARQL endpoint, TopBraid EDG-VM has many built-in RESTful web services. The TopBraid platform makes it easy to add new specialized ones. Starting with the 6.0 release, there is also support for GraphQL.
Using TopBraid EDG-VM FAQ
Learn the ins and outs of TopBraid EDG-VM and get comfortable with the platform.
Is TopBraid EDG-VM training available?
Many people can get started using EDG-VM once they have worked their way through the tutorial included with the documentation. To provide a more detailed understanding of TopBraid EDG-VM, TopQuadrant provides a four-day course in which the first day covers features available to end users and the second through fourth day cover administrative and customization topics.
How do I publish a vocabulary?
An optional EDG-VM Explorer add-on functions as a read-only version of EDG-VM. A license for it lets you use it to publish one or more vocabularies to as many people as you like for a flat fee.
Can TopBraid EDG-VM display information in ______ language (e.g., French, Chinese, etc.)?
All resources managed by EDG have names (labels). These names can be language tagged to capture names in different national languages. How resource names are displayed to the user is determined by the language preferences in user’s browser. Thus, two users can be looking at the same asset collection (e.g., the same taxonomy) and one would see concepts displayed in English and another would see them displayed in Chinese. The same goes for any textual information about concepts – e.g., definitions, notes, etc. Fields one see on the resource forms (e.g., ‘alternative label’, ‘definition’, ‘note’, etc.) are also resources. If they are given names in different languages, then users will see not only the value of a field in their preferred language, but also the field name as well.
Does EDG-VM auto-map two taxonomies? Two ontologies?
Yes, auto-mapping based on the similarity of resource names is available ‘out of the box’ in Crosswalks. You can also add custom rules to be used for mappings.
Can TopBraid EDG-VM tag my documents for me?
TopBraid EDG-VM focuses on multi-user, networked, vocabulary management, yet it integrates with Maui Server (See TopBraid Tagger and AutoClassifier) to automate classification of content tag sets.
Does EDG-VM support SKOS-XL?
Yes, every taxonomy, by default is based on SKOS. You can configure EDG-VM for every taxonomy to be based on SKOS-XL. Or you can selectively decide that some of your taxonomies should be based on SKOS-XL.
Does TopBraid EDG-VM include a report that shows ______? Can it import or export the _____ format?
Out of the box, EDG-VM includes a nice selection of reports, import formats, and export formats. The flexibility of the TopBraid platforms means that EDG-VM can be configured to read new formats and to output new formats and reports with minimal effort.
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