Atomio

Atomio is a syndication server, used to manage and share documents across disparate locations, which has been designed to work alongside Ontoserver.

Atomio hosts terminology content as entries in one or more syndication feeds. The feeds are published using an extension to the Internet Engineering Task Force’s Atom Syndication Feed Format described in the NCTS Syndication Feed Specification – the same format used by Ontoserver to advertise and consume terminology content via its syndication capabilities.

Use cases

Atomio exists to hold static copies of terminology artefacts and advertise those artefacts in one or more feeds. This capability can be used in a number of ways to meet a variety of use cases, which fall into the following categories.

1. Store indexes. The Ontoserver indexing process knows how to push indexes upon completion to Atomio’s API, directly into a feed. This makes Atomio a really convenient location to store built indexes that become immediately available to syndicate into Ontoserver via Atomio’s Atom syndication feeds.
2. Store external data. Atomio can be used to store externally syndicated content which can then be syndicated into Ontoserver instances. The advantage of using Atomio over syndicating directly from the external source is that Atomio keeps a copy of the artefact as a record of what was loaded, and will be available later even if the artefact is no longer available at the external source.
3. Release candidates. Atomio can be used to clone other syndication feeds, such as Ontoserver’s. This can be used to take “snapshots” of an authoring Ontoserver instance’s syndication feed to create a static “release candidate” collection of content.
4. Production source. Atomio can also be used as a static and reliable source of curated sets of content for an Ontoserver instance or instances to load for use by other systems. This facilitates using ephemeral Ontoserver instances, that can be disposed of and restarted loading a managed set of static content.
5. Syndication source. Ontoserver provides its content as an Atom syndication feed, which can be accessed by other Ontoserver instances or other software using the open Atom feed format. However it can be beneficial to take this load off read-only “production” Ontoserver instances and offload that onto Atomio. Atomio has a very low resource overhead and can serve other arbitrary types of artefacts that cannot be stored in Ontoserver, and hence can’t be in Ontoserver’s syndication feed.