OpenThesaurus

OpenThesaurus (www.openthesaurus.de), a web-based thesaurus management tool

Copyright (C) 2009 vionto GmbH, Berlin
Copyright (C) 2011-2022 Daniel Naber, www.danielnaber.de

OpenThesaurus is a web-based tool for the development and maintenance of thesauri and ontologies. It requires a Java application server or servlet container (e.g. Apache Tomcat) and is typically used with MySQL as a stand-alone database (other databases may work but have not been tested).

See https://github.com/OpenTaal/opentaal-openthesaurus/blob/master/README.md for more detailed installation instructions.

Building

If you want to build OpenThesaurus on your own you will need Grails 3.3.1.

For development, your database needs to be configured in grails-app/conf/application.yml. Use grails run-app to directly start the web-application in development mode. It is then available at http://localhost:8080/.

Use grails war to build a web application which can be deployed to a Java servlet container like Tomcat.

Setup for users who install the .war file

Note: this section hasn't been updated for some time, we suggest building as documented above

The openthesaurus.war file needs to be deployed to your servlet container. Please refer to the container's documentation on how to do that.

1. Copy your JDBC database connector *.jar file to the WEB-INF/lib directory. If you use MySQL, you can get the database connector at https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/

2. Configure your database access in WEB-INF/classes/datasource.properties.
   A typical MySQL-based configuration for datasource.properties looks like this:

     dataSource.url=jdbc:mysql://127.0.0.1:3306/openthesaurus?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8
     dataSource.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
     dataSource.username=dbuser
     dataSource.password=xyz
     dataSource.dbCreate=update
   

   With these settings, the database openthesaurus needs to be created first manually using the database's tools. The tables will be automatically created by OpenThesaurus on its first startup.

3. For now, an in-memory database needs to be set up and updated regularly by accessing the page synset/createMemoryDatabase before OpenThesaurus can be used. This can be done by calling a command like this:

    curl -I http://localhost:8080/openthesaurus/synset/createMemoryDatabase
   

   Since the size of in-memory tables is 16M by default, after a while the above operation might start to fail (you will get 500 Internal Server Error as response at the above URL and you will see memWordsTmp is full in your server logs. In this case what you need to do is increase max_heap_table_size in MySQL. You can use SHOW VARIABLES to see the current value of this variable in your installation.

4. Set the values in WEB-INF/classes/openthesaurus.properties

5. For bigger data sets it might be necessary to create indexes manually in your database:

    ALTER TABLE `term` ADD INDEX ( `word` ) 
    ALTER TABLE `term` ADD INDEX ( `normalized_word` ) 
    ALTER TABLE `synset` ADD INDEX ( `is_visible` ) 
   

6. In case you run into problems with searching for special characters, it might be required to modify all tables whose collation is latin1_swedish_ci to utf8_general_ci, like this:

    ALTER TABLE `term` CHANGE `word` `word` VARCHAR( 255 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL;
    ALTER TABLE `term` CHANGE `normalized_word` `normalized_word` VARCHAR( 255 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NULL DEFAULT NULL;
    ALTER TABLE `term` CHANGE `user_comment` `user_comment` VARCHAR( 255 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NULL DEFAULT NULL;
    ALTER TABLE `wikipedia_links` CHANGE `link` `link` VARCHAR( 100 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL;
    ALTER TABLE `wikipedia_pages` CHANGE `title` `title` VARCHAR( 100 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL;  
    ALTER TABLE `wiktionary` CHANGE `headword` `headword` VARCHAR( 255 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL ,
       CHANGE `meanings` `meanings` TEXT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NULL DEFAULT NULL ,
       CHANGE `synonyms` `synonyms` TEXT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NULL DEFAULT NULL;
    ALTER TABLE `user_event` CHANGE `old_value` `old_value` LONGTEXT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NULL DEFAULT NULL;
    ALTER TABLE `user_event` CHANGE `new_value` `new_value` LONGTEXT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NULL DEFAULT NULL;
    ALTER TABLE `user_event` CHANGE `class` `class` VARCHAR( 255 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL;
    ALTER TABLE `user_event` CHANGE `change_desc` `change_desc` LONGTEXT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NULL DEFAULT NULL;
    ALTER TABLE `user_event` CHANGE `ip_address` `ip_address` VARCHAR( 255 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NULL DEFAULT NULL;
    ALTER TABLE `user_event` CHANGE `word` `word` VARCHAR( 255 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NULL DEFAULT NULL;    
   

7. The default administration account is admin with the password admin - make sure this is changed after your first login. If you are logged in as admin, the OpenThesaurus homepage will show a link to the administration page.

Data Import

Data from the old PHP-based version of OpenThesaurus can be imported by calling http://localhost:8080/openthesaurus/import/index. Please check the result carefully as it has only been tested with the German data so far.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.