Italian English
I’ve just returned from the First Italian Workshop on the Semantic Web (SWAP 2004), organised by long time chat-buddy and RDFIG lurker GiovanniT.
RDF Content Negotiation (Apache and Java)
I notice that several folk are arriving at the rdf namespace oddness page which describes the slightly opaque problem of understanding RDF Schema URI’s and how to go about loading them. I’ve long since found a solution, following a discussion on #rdfig a long time back. That solution is content negotiation, so for the record, …
Mixing RDF with XML
The pages discussed here concern the representation of XML within RDF (a very different concept to that of the serialization of RDF in XML).
who provides the icons?
the question of who (or what) should proivide the iconic representation for nodes is playing on my mind. I’m thinking there needs to be a local cache – which can be initially populated with some defaults – but that it should be a dynamic thing basd on resource type, and using an RDF lookup .
rdf namespace oddness workaround
One of the thgings I’ve added today is a little code to guess where the schema may be – in order to validate or interpret conent the schema needs to be accessible, so the code now checks for index.rdf and schema.rdf files if the supplied namespace is one that does not end in a “#” …
core additions
An addition to the core today is the ability to load RDF from a URI as well as a file – to demonstrate this I now have a news feed from theregister.co.uk being pulled in to the system when it’s started.
sorts & menu
today i’ve added sorting to the list of things the code can do. there’s not much intelligence there yet, but the mechanism is connected. added a menu into the Resource List view so the sort can be selected, and started to use Actions to abstract the users selections from the underlying code which implements them.
browser similarities (Forward & Back)
my comment yesterday about bookmarks triggered somehting this morning – what may be useful would be forward and back buttons in the explorer, so that current, and previous roots could be viewed and reviewed – this should be easy to implement by maintaining the INode tree. having a preference of how many histories would ensure …
The beginnings of integration.
The List and Explorer views are now working insofar as they can be created and display some content. Double clicking on an entry in the Resource List makes that entry the head node in the Explorer – this mechanism, when combined with filters in the Resource List makes it easy to find the node you …
accessing the core
i’ve been humming and harring about the core model. to be really capable there is a need to avoid over-dependence on Jena and over-engineering the API. i’d like the core to be abstracted from Jena so that as if an alternative model comes along, or if/when Jena release version 2, there shouldn’t be any major …
list view
Although not immediately apparent, the usefulness of the list view is large. In a nutshell, the concept of the list view is that it provides a flat list of all Resources thus: To list is very basic, so perhaps the resource type could be included in a table rather than a list view. Filters could …
RDF Namespace Oddness
in building RDFSchemaLabelProvider i’ve had some interesting namespace problems. some namespaces are defined, ending with a “#”, which include the name of the definition file, some have no hash, no trailing slash, and define a URL where that file can be assumed to be, for example: [xml] [/xml] This is a pain when trying to …
rdf structures
RDF contains some structures. Bag and Set, for example – then – extensions to the schema can also contain structures – DAM+OIL and OWL for example add concepts of cardinality – should the browser be able to handle these specially, or just treat them as resources (which they are). Essentially – is there a need …
adaptive resource representation
the idea of dynamic schema validation got me thinking about adaptive resource representation in the UI. It coudl be quite effectively handled with decorators, so the concept could work for more than just schema – it could be extended to information which is owned vs borrowed, trusted vs un-trusted, fresh vs stale vs expired etc…
Programming the UI with RDFS:Label
Although not all schemas are accessible, many are; which is good news. What’s even better is the existence of “rdfs:label” which “Provides a human-readable version of a resource name.” So now any unknown label should be retrievable by going to the URI specified in the NS, downloading the RDF Schema document, pulling out the appropriate …
properties linked
Some good news. I now have an RDFX View linked to the properties view so that both Resources and Literals are showing up. Still to do however: 1. Stop showing the triple, just show the RDF object value 2. Display resources and Literals in different twisties within the Properties View (and add user preference) 3. …
IPropertySource and IAdaptable
In order to get an RDF Resource displayed in the Properties view it needs to be accessible through an object which implements the IPropertySource interface. My first pass saw me configure my INode interface to extends IPropertySource, however, noting that INode is merely a container for a Resource, not the resource itself, and that several …
icon indirection and themes [and vaguely, accessibility]
perhaps a schema for linking icons to node types – should be slightly indirected such that (a) there can be an officially sanctioned representation (b) there can be themed alternate representations and (c) it’s not limited to bitmaps – an SVG based icon, for example, would be most welcome – even if eclipse can’t display …
xul
XUL looks very interesting – i’ve taken the time to download LUXOR a few days back, but it’s just too much extra technology to get on my brain-radar at the moment. Briefly, XUL the XML UI Language, could enable me to build a single interface, defined in XML for any platform – however – the …
representing rdf resources with icons
The current use of icons is not brilliant – it needs to be defined such that for any UI widget there is the ability to choose an icon. However, it’s really down to the schema rather than the UI – sounds another job for our retrospectively linked hero RDF, and some kind of indirection mechanism.