1. W E B V E V E R I E T
Subjects - A generic
Topic Maps viewer for
the iPhone and Android
Jan Schreiber<jans@ravn.no>
Ravn Webveveriet AS, 2010-10-01
mandag 11. oktober 2010

2. Overview
• Inspired by Patrick Durusau who blogged about the
iPhone and Topic Maps
• It's a prototype!
• Idea: Browse small topic maps on a mobile device
• Uses the tmjs Topic Maps engine
• It's three applications in one:
• iPhone App
• Android App
• Web Application
W E B V E V E R I E T
mandag 11. oktober 2010

3. Architecture
HTML rendering
subjects.js
jQTouch
tm.js
jQuery
PhoneGap
Native iPhone App Native Android App
W E B V E V E R I E T
mandag 11. oktober 2010

4. Navigating topic maps
on a mobile device
• Visible information has to be reduced to a
minimum
• Existing viewers like Omnigator and Maiana
display lots of information on their main page
that is rarely used as an entry point for navigation
(role types, name type, occurrence types)
• "Topic map Metadata", "Browse By Type",
"Browse By Name"
• From a topic page the user can navigate to other
topic pages via associations
W E B V E V E R I E T
mandag 11. oktober 2010

5. Displaying topic labels
• Find the default name
• Find a name with the fewest scoping
topics
• Find a subject identifier, subject locator,
item identifier
W E B V E V E R I E T
mandag 11. oktober 2010

6. Used components
• tmjs Topic Maps engine
• PhoneGap: Framework for wrapping
web applications
• jQTouch: gives it a native look and feel
W E B V E V E R I E T
mandag 11. oktober 2010

7. Issues
• Memory usage is hard to control
• Script execution timeouts occur
• jQTouch maybe not the best choice
• PSIs are not meant for mobile devices
W E B V E V E R I E T
mandag 11. oktober 2010

8. Current status
• It works (on a Samsung Galaxy S and in
the iPhone simulator)
• Still work in progress
W E B V E V E R I E T
mandag 11. oktober 2010

9. Future work
• Maiana Integration
• Editing features and web sockets for
communication with a (node) server
• Web SQL Database support
• Support for GeoURIs
W E B V E V E R I E T
mandag 11. oktober 2010