Setting Kowari up

How to get and setup a Kowari metastore on a machine. This will provide you with an alternative source of knowledge. While the GOM registry still stays the most preferred registry to rely upon during the construction phase, a local registry may be useful for testing purposes as well as in times of need when the external GOM service is not available (e.g. due to lack of Internet connection). Here are the steps:

  1. Get kowari from Kowari site
  2. Tested with kowari-1.1.0-pre2 distribution
  3. Unzip the distribution and compile it ($ ./build.sh dist)
  4. You'll need java 1.4.x (not 1.5!) to do that properly
  5. Run Kowari server: ($ java -jar kowari-1.1.0.jar -p 8081 -s kowari)
  6. Note you can do that with your favourite java 1.5 jre as well

Feeding your Kowari with knowledge

Now you need to tackle with your Kowari's inner emptiness:

  1. Run ITQL shell: ($ java -jar itql-1.1.0.jar)
  2. Create a store with a proper name recognized by WCT
  3. Name format: VO_NAME+REGISTRY_COMPONENT (all lowercase) e.g. ctmsr means a service registry of CTM VO.
  4. Load ontologies from GOM (yes, you need GOM at least this once) - you may use http url of GOM stores parameters of ITQL command
  5. Basic ITQL tutorial: old Kowari pages

Setting WCT installation to work with Kowari

Changes needed in etc/wct.props file:

  1. Set KOWARI_ENDPOINT_ADDRESS for the Kowari client to contact the proper registry
  2. Set KOWARI_STORE_URI for the address of the store given by the Kowari server while it starts up
  3. Change REGISTRY_LANGUAGE to "ITQL2XML" protocol to make sure WCT talks Kowari-compliant language

And good luck with all the above... as you are going to need it a lot :).