Conzilla - The Concept Browser

News

• 2010-10-10 Conzilla 2.3.0 released. (New collaboration backend)
• 2007-06-11 Conzilla 2.2.3 released. (Bugfix release)
• 2007-03-27 Conzilla 2.2.2 released together with Collaborilla 1.1. See the release notes for details.
• 2007-02-13 Conzilla 2.2.1 released. (Bugfix release)
• 2008-02-05 Conzilla user group started.
• 2008-02-05 Conzilla 2.2 released. See the release notes for details.
• 2007-09-19 Conzilla 2.1.3 released. (Bugfix release)
• 2007-07-05 Conzilla 2.1.2 released. (Bugfix release)
• 2007-06-19 Conzilla 2.1.1 released. (Bugfix release)
• 2007-06-08 Conzilla 2.1 released together with Collaborilla 1.0. See the release notes for details.

Overview

Conzilla2 - our second generation concept browser - is a knowledge management tool with many purposes. Among other things, it aims to be

• an efficient collaborative knowledge environment / modeling tool.
• a versatile interface for editing and styling RDF.

Conzilla presents knowledge in terms of specific maps, Context-maps. A Context-map displays nodes and arcs, from now on referred to as concepts and concept-relations, with specific box-forms, icons, arrow-heads, linestyles etc. To get an idea look at the screenshots below, click on them for full scale versions:

Startmap - examplifies different types of concepts in a single context-map

The start map in edit mode

Conzilla2 features

• Conzilla2 supports an open ended set of different diagram types. Per default the UML class, activity, Use-case, and process diagrams are provided.
• Each concept and concept-relation has a 'life of its own'. This means that the same concept and concept-relation can occur in different maps, which is in accordance with the knowledge manifold information topology. It is also possible to provide a simple hyperlink from each concept or concept-relation to another context-map.
• Context-maps, concepts, and concept-relations can be endowed with metadata.
• Concepts or concept-relation can be filled with content components in the form of links to other resources, e.g. webpages or books in a library, persons etc.
• A context-map, a concept or a concept-relation can be distributed, allowing people to extend them easily. In this case they must be loaded from different sources. Each of these sources we refer to as a Knowledge Patch.
• A Knowledge Manifold typically contains a set of Context-maps and has a responsible publisher which we call a knowledge gardener.
• The apperance in Conzilla2 is controlled by stylesheets.
• Everything is stored in RDF allowing integration with other tools.
• Conzilla2 includes an editor for Context-maps.
• Since Conzilla 2.1 context-maps can be published easily to an information directory: Collaborilla.
• Published maps can be loaded by everyone who has access to Collaborilla (which means literally everyone, since this access is not restricted).
• Everyone can comment on or contribute to published maps.

Conzilla history

The principles behind the design of efficient concept browsers have been developed at the KMR group at CID since 1997. The first incarnation of Conzilla, Conzilla1 can be found here.