Hi! I am currently evaluating the various OpenLink offerings as part of an organisation's info/comms strategy. Few questions:
1. Honestly what is the state of development for OpenLink products? I have seen a number of notable mentions on w3c sites of the products utilities, and have seen them in use on dbpedia. This gives me the impression of a wealth of power and rich feature set. Please excuse the bluntness but the trouble is, when I start browsing openlinksw.com I am hit by some 49,700 pages. "Which part of openlinksw.com were you browsing?" I hear you ask, well I only wish I knew. I look to the left and top of the web page, where navigation menus typically sit, in order to orient myself, but see only long lists of feed formats or feedback tools. Every product seems to have multiple, independent, incarnations; some of which are wildly outdated, though most are undated and I can only guess by the amount of broken links. After what must be 6 hours browsing, getting lost in everything from a "Monthly Support Newsletter" ending in 2009 and OdsWikiWeb timestamped 2008, I am still very disoriented. 2. Are there case studies available of OpenLink products, specifically Virtuoso and OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS)? I would love to know how organisations are using these powerful systems. Even better would be links to live installs. 3. Where are microblogging features at in ODS? I notice PubSubHubbub on the feature list. Perfect start, I know OStatus/Status.Net can use it. Also feed input type things. In the v6.1.3 release notes, on the ODS feature list, I see "Added microblog template". Sounds good. How does this work in practice? Are there live examples of ODS microblogs/importing of such? 4. Can ODS be themed? The interface looks like it was designed by a programmer – highly functional but not so intuitive. Any changes to the open source edition seem to be via dense vad files – I'm not sure how productive branching that file would be. I am mostly looking to implement the foaf-focused profile manager, and would thus like to make that the interface's obvious focus – I suspect the tiny tiny [edit] link in the top nav menu will somewhat lack prominence (to say the least) for a non-technical user. 5. How integrated are the ODS wiki instance logins to ODS logins? Is there Single Sign On? I am especially interested in MediaWiki. (The "Semantic MediaWiki" extensions show promise for integration into other RDF capable platforms.) Kind regards, Peter
