In the last year, I was involved in many discussions revolving about the question of “how to make a semantic desktop gui”. Semantic Web guis in general have to be dynamic, adaptive, generic, because the ontologies are changing and data of two ontologies can be mixed. This causes friction in software development, when all our frameworks and developers are used to relational databases or compiled Java beans that hold the information.
To gather my own thoughts for our NEPOMUK project I have prepared some slides to get an overview, a document summing up my view, and a screencast showing one framework.
- creating rich semantic web guis – slides about haystack, dbin, fresnel, and some ideas for Nepomuk
- PSEWArchitecture connecting database, pimoservice and an Eclipse based user interface (PositionPaper) – a paper making the suggestion begun in the slides more precise, PSEW referring to the p2p semantic eclipse workbench.
- a screencast of myself using gnogno, our gui framework
If you are interested in Semantic Web guis on the desktop, have a look. If you have a similar itch to scratch and want to join our open source projects, contact me!
thanks for the feedback, I agree here:
* hand-crafted guis are more usable than auto-generated
* Java is a minority on the desktop
When coming to “professional” software I disagree, especially with desktop ERP, CRM, Etc:
* MS-Outlook is build from standard components, the forms are a scripted assembly of components, the underlying basis is hardcore c/c++
* if you run SAP R/3 or Lotus Notes, most of the GUI is somehow auto-generated (not that R/3 is known for its top usability)
* We develop Java because we can run it on all platforms and its simple to program (comapred to c), so this is a development cost question
* Relational databases are sometimes embedded inside applications for easier programming.