Particular question about what is (not) Wandora

[mordenkainen]

I see Wandora as a triple-store MS Access. Wandora incorporates simple database, importer and editor for it, browser for collected data and custom forms. Wandora's presentation and customizing are a little bit weaker, but it have advantage of interactive graph panel for editing and browsing data. So as Wandora have similar structure as Acces I suggest that it may be used in similar way.

But I'm aware that two-day dip is not sufficient to judge over technology. So I'd like to know if Wandora is suited for a task I'd like to perform with it. I have a sqlite database scraped from the site: http://kmalloy.cloudapp.net/dndtools.eu/index.html It contains many rules, spells, monsters and other stuff from 3rd edition of the d&d. Now site has legal issues and I'd like to make a local copy of the dndtools knowledge database. Something that allows browse entries in the database, search among them, and read full description of found entries. That local copy is supposed to be used by me only, so it's ok if database would have ugly design, complicated and obscured interface.

I'm ready to do some work on conversion from sqlite to topicmap, construct search queries, fill custom forms and write some code in java (preferably scala) if necessary. Other choice I have is to use orientdb as graph DB engine, javafx as GUI framework and write simple application to map data from local store to screen. I bother that choosing Wandora would double all the work needed for standalone application but in unfamiliar and not-so-well suited technology stack. On the other hand standalone application may become pretty complicated if I would like to enrich it with basic editing, such as removing corrupted entries, correcting misprints, adding missing associations between entries and so on.

So taking in account my goals and resources should I give a try to Wandora. Have I catched what it is designed to be used for?

[akivela]

Hi Mordenkainen

You dropped a difficult and broad question, I must admit. In generally, the use case you describe sounds very much within the scope of Wandora application.

Wandora and topic maps are very good if your data consists of concepts. On the other hand, if your data is mainly numeric, topic maps may not be the best solution. I suggest you get to know the Topic Maps in general and in Wandora particular. Looking at the data you are about to store, it looks to me that Wandora suits you well. You may encounter some problems with topic naming though. Wandora auto-merges topics easily and you need to take care that different concepts really have different basenames. Also, the data looks small enough to be stored into Wandora's memory topic map. Database topic map is very slow and not really a valid option at the moment.

Thinking of importing the data to Wandora, you have several options. You can either build a custom script that transforms your database data into a topic map which is imported to Wandora, use Wandora's Database extractor or create simple data-slices and import/paste those into the Wandora.

If I were you, I would use Wandora application itself as the data editor. Wandora can be used to edit the (topic map) data very efficiently. Once it already exists, it really doesn't double the work needed but reduces it significantly.

If you want to create a nice user interface for your data, you can employ Wandora's embedded HTTP server and WWW browser and develop the user interface with HTML+Javascript added with Apache Velocity templating language.

As a summary, my (biased) opinion is that you should give Wandora a try.

Kind regards,
Aki / Wandora Team

[mordenkainen]

Thank you for guiding. Your advice accepted. Wandora seems to be useful not only for data scrapping but aslo as a kind of mind map utility with less focus on fast editing and updating and more about observing and strict definitions. It is something between initial draft and final document. So now I have already two reasons to study Wandora.