Eric Freese of ISOGEN has announced release 0.72 of SemanText, a Python application using topic maps to represent semantic networks.

SemanText's home page explains that semantic networks are "a building block for artificial intelligence applications such as inference engines and expert systems. SemanText builds a knowledge base, in the form of a semantic network, from the topic map. New information can be added to the knowledge base and topic map automatically when the user defines rules which are used to infer new knowledge."

New features in this release include:

• Context-based harvesting, allowing topics and associations to be automatically constructed from XML documents by identifying specific information to be harvested.
• Full topic map editing capability via the SemanText interface.
• Choice of look-and-feel: web browser style of interface, or push-button style.
• Choice of view: topic map point of view or a knowledge base point of view.
• Topic maps can be exported in accordance with the new XTM specification.