Octapy3: a distributed and cooperative semantic web oriented CMS

Octapy3 was developed to create “cooperating communities” of knowledge providers in a distributed environment. Octapy3 is entirely written in Python, it uses the Zope Application Server and the Plone CMS as web publishing tool. The design architecture is a component-based architecture using the Zope3 CA framework. There are components to integrate the OAI protocol in order exchange metadata among applications, to explicitly create relations among documents allocated in different computational node. Also the Octpay3 framework manages cartographic document and RDF/RDFS serialization of documents and content types. In the rest of the paper we describe the component architecture adopted, wit special attention to the functionalities and techniques used to overcome the Zope/Plone environment. Next, the Octpay Configuration Markup Language (OCML) is described together some example of its usage to described the document structure, the component description. OCML allows to personalize the managed contents, to easily extend the environment and to establish relations among documents. The paper describes also the set up used to test it with cultural heritage contents. We developed the napolibniculturali.it network of cultural heritage knowledge providers. To each provider the Octapy3 environment provide them with a set of tools, for example, to implement the cartographic interface for contents mediation, to build intermuseum virtual collections, stressing out either the effective visit or the conceptual features. napolibeniculturali.it is sponsored and used by the Direzione Regionale per i Beni Culturali e Paesaggistici della Campania to promote knowledge about cultural heritage goods of Campania. Currently this community is built of about 50 information node providers, and it interoperates with the Italian cultural heritage portal managed by the Italian Ministers of Cultural Heritage