metaphactory 5.3 delivers multiple improvements to the ontology editor & graph canvas
We are excited to announce the release of metaphactory 5.3, which comes with new permission roles for ontologies and vocabularies, improvements to the overall usability of the visual ontology editor, and a new functionality for interactive node grouping on the graph canvas. Keep reading!
New permission roles for ontologies and vocabularies
metaphactory 5.3 introduces two new roles that are specific to ontologies and vocabularies and can be assigned per individual user and per individual asset:
- Owners – Users who have permissions to delete, publish or initiate a new version of an ontology or a vocabulary
- Authors – Users who have permissions to edit an ontology or a vocabulary that is in development
These roles refine the previous "ontology/vocabulary admin" role that could only be assigned globally to edit all ontologies and vocabularies.
The permissions roles are also reflected in the user interface, where different actions are available depending on the user’s role. Ultimately, they deliver additional flexibility to asset management in metaphactory, further streamlining governance and collaboration processes.
Ontology editor usability improvements
Aiming to optimize the user journey and user experience in the ontology editor, metaphactory 5.3 simplifies the process of making changes to ontology elements. With metaphactory 5.3, changes to a class, a relation or a property are automatically applied when editing the elements, without having to individually confirm every change. This allows users to seamlessly navigate and edit elements, before saving all changes to the ontology.
Furthermore, metaphactory 5.3 significantly simplifies how relations and attributes are created. In particular, the process of creating or assigning attributes to a class has undergone significant usability improvements. This is complemented by a number of smaller enhancements, such as alphabetic sorting of suggestions or autofocus on the creation of elements to minimize the number of clicks required.
Interactive grouping of nodes on the graph canvas
Graph visualizations are great at revealing intricate networks and previously unknown relationships in one view. metaphactory 5.3 delivers extensive improvements to the user interface for graph visualizations and allows end users to seamlessly explore, summarize, communicate and interpret graphs with a larger number of nodes.
Using a new node grouping concept on the graph canvas, end users can interactively group instances in the knowledge graph, for example, based on type, relation, or custom manual selection. Groups can be persisted to diagrams and also be ungrouped at any time.
This feature is available by default in all out-of-the-box instance exploration and diagramming views. In future metaphactory releases, we plan to extend this functionality to also become available in the graph authoring mode and to be configurable as part of the application logic, i.e., allowing to pre-initialize groups in graph canvas views embedded into custom application pages.
What else is new in metaphactory 5.3
- Improved config flexibility of LLM-based interface for natural language to SPARQL translation: Ability to connect to OpenAI Azure, model name and parameters as a consequence, provide larger ontologies as context, configurable entity detection prompts / entity examples
- Support for transposed table view in the semantic-table component
- Ability to bootstrap / load models (ontologies, vocabularies and other small RDF files) from apps
- More efficient RDF uploads through delegation to native RDF Graph Store protocol APIs as provided by database vendors
- SCIM 2.0 module for authorization, separate from SSO authentication
- Improvements to the pathfinder configuration
- Support for OIDC SSO with PKCE
Have a look at the release notes or