Year: 2004

I had this discussion already a year ago with Barbara Geyer from the FH Eisenstadt. Experienced in Knowledge Management Projects, she pointed me to “seperate concept from instances”

In my current gnowsis nightly build, this is not really done, but I have strong feelings towards it 🙂

The background: When I write a generic Semantic Web app, I have to make a User Interface also. The question is now, how to render an RDF graph, that has by itself no structure at all. RDF graphs are just graphs, based on RDF itself you cannot even identify classes and instances. So you need more information to display the stuff, for example you can use:

• RDF-S info to treat classes other than resources. And express subclass/subproperty relations
• DublinCore to indentify prominent parts of a graph that you can display “in front”
• DublinCore to identify partOf / relatedTo things.
• SKOS to organize these things into concept schemes. Seperate Instances from Concepts

The thing with RDF is, that concepts are also instances, in the view of RDF resource instances. So you need to seperate the concepts somehow from the instances.

Example: how to render a FOAF file that contains facts about a Person, related Persons and facts about these related Persons?
Using above schemas, you can subclass some of the FOAF properties to express that things are only related and not part of the resource. (f.e. foaf:knows as subproperty of http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/relation)

You then could code your UI and your logic behind to show related stuff in a seperate window (f.e. sidebar window) and have “part of” stuff in the “main window”.

but more important, you can pass the knowledge behind on to the user. Its good to allow the user to “add new subparts” and to “add new relations”. So users have a guide what to put where.

more to follow when I have coded these ideas….

Michael Zeltner has pointed me again to the obvious.

Foaf grows.

www.foafspace.com/
“FoaFSpace has indexed 1550126 documents. You can search by name, nickname, instant messaging ID, or mailbox.”

beta.plink.org/
“Welcome to PLINK, a new way to find friends, and friends of friends!
PLINK gets all its user data from ‘FOAF’ (Friend-of-a-Friend) files which anyone can add to their web site. “

what is see here is the growing of the real semantic web. not tiny semantic web, not light, the real thing. crazy. have to change the heading of my blog from “Building the Semantic Web was harder than I thought.” to
“watching as the semantic web grows”.

http://www.gnowsis.org
http://www.gnowsis.org/Download

Kaiserslautern, 28. September 2004
Hello all <foaf:Person>!

I have the pleasure to announce that we released an alpha version of the Semantic Desktop framework “gnowsis” today. It is published under a BSD compatible license.

gnowsis is a personal semantic web desktop server – for short: a Semantic Desktop. Like a local webserver, that can be seen only by you and that contains your own files, emails, friends and photos.

Some gnowsis features are:

Server Features

* Local RDF Database (Jena Model based)
* Data integration Hub. integrates different Data sources.
* Filesystem adapter
* MP3-ID3 tag adapter (using MP3 Library by Jens Vonderheide)
* Microsoft Outlook adapter
* Mozilla Thunderbird email adapter
* Mozilla Firefox bookmarks adapter
* XML/RPC API
* Java Client API
* full text indexing (using Apache Lucene)
* local webserver for experiments (using Jetty)
* Many RDFS vocabs used

Browser Features

* Browse the local Semantic Desktop
* shows related information for any resource
* Manage your projects using ordinary File Folders
* full text search
* Link anything with drag-drop
* annotate photos and persons

Framework features

* Handy RDF utilities: org.gnowsis.util.*
* Remote Models. Access your jena Models on remote servers like they are local, through the Jena model interface and XML-RPC magic. See org.gnowsis.util.remotemodel
* File backed models with convenience. Have your model save every X seconds to a file! See org.gnowsis.util.filemodel

Non-Features

* RDF data in Gnowsis is read only.
* Stability and performance. This is a research prototype. Don’t use it in commercial projects. This is alpha. Wait a few months and it will be beta.

Gnowsis was developed by me during the last two years. Full credits given here.
The release contains full source and build scripts for ant. Gnowsis was developed using Eclipse/Ant/Apache/…

Recently I blogged about “a generic rdf browser is not possible”. It was good to put this provocative, so some people thought about the idea, too.

Jamie Pitts wrote: “Leo Sauermann explained that a generic RDF browser needs a different display definition for each RDF-schema. This makes a lot of sense. I would add that browser-style applications which truly take advantage of RDF out there will also require something along the lines of a “useage template” for each useage scenario.”

Danny Ayers blogged with something very practical: “From a random snippet of RDF/XML you can still infer quite a few things – what are properties, what are classes. Barest minimum is that you know something is to be treated as a resource or as a literal. That’s infinitely more that you get with arbitrary XML alone (you may know the datatype of something thanks to a schema, but even then you won’t know what the something represents).”

(and Shelley quoted this)

That is similiar to what I do in gnowsis’ browser.

What I want to add is:
If you just have the information “this is a dc:title” than this is not enough. A snippet of RDF (an RDF chunk/subgraph/CBD) to render will most of the time describe one resource. And we have been building applications for many years now that do excatly this (Address books for persons, ERP for order management, photo finder for photos :-). Compiled applications, structured and immovable.
In the web scenario we use HTML to render this information and in the intranet scenario, many applications that were before compiled and client GUI are now intranet applications.

Building applications for certain purposes is a good thing and we should continue this tradition. One UI for photos, one for People, etc. The apple address book is loved by Mac-thusiasts, let them keep it. But RDF-ify it.

So I would continue writing web applications and normal C++ GUI applications BUT use RDF as data source and rendering source. “browsing” can then happen by clicking a “related” button and opening other applications. Same with the web browser.

Generic RDF rendering (as described by danny in short) is useful for NERDS but not for end users. I showed my generic rendering to test users and they couldn’t make anything out of it. Well, probably I am a bad programmer ;-]

I don’t want to build a generic “haystack” like architecture to force every hacker to code her/his UI in XSLT/haystack/XYZ. Keep your code, but make it RDF compatible.

so thats why I fumble around with gnowsis all the time, to see how application integration could work.

btw: 2 hours to alpha release.

I announced an RDF browser some days ago and I have more thoughts about this issue:

A generic RDF browser is not possible.

an RDF browser is possible, but it needs stylesheets.

It cannot be made, it will not be good and it is not needed.
Explaination:

A generic RDF browser is a piece of software that will display RDF like a web-browser. You can see it, read it, click it etc. It should generate a good representation of the contents, but without any rendering instructions (like css or xslt)

XML is also not rendered in a generic way. Never. IF you see xml, it is usually rendered using an XSLT to render it as HTML. But for each XML-Schema you will need a seperate XSLT.

The same with RDF: to render RDF, you need a kind of XSLT for every RDF-Schema around. So what we need is people like Masahide Kanzaki who do great XSLTs for RDF.

And a way to use these XSLTs. They may not actually be XSLT, it also may be a kind of XForms idea. We also need to use the RDF extension for XSLT (f.e. Damians Treehugger).

So: Do not try to make a generic RDF browser. Try to render the concrete RDF example you know of. Build something like FoafNaut.

seven days until gnowsis alpha release.

Some parts of gnowsis work better now then one year before. Most parts are quite good. The user interface is still bad 🙂

Announcing RDF Browsers is a good thing to do, so I announce the Gnowsis Semantic Web browser!

Next tuesday, you will see the alpha version of Gnowsis “Enquire2” browser which is part of the gnogno ui package.

It can render RDF in a half-intuitive way and can be used to link any resource using a central RDF database. But what rules is DragNDrop support. We can drag-drop files from th e MacOSX finder and windows explorer into gnowsis.

That reminds me of Timothy Falconer’s post about his wife playing solitaire. I like this article very much. My wife also likes to play solitaire very much and on sunday, it opened my eyes: I have to write an application that is used by my wife as frequently as solitaire.

So enquire2 should be a solitaire replacement. My wife tried it out, but it is still too difficult to use. So we will probably have a student program a photo annotation tool to test this solitaire thesis 🙂

btw: 7 days until gnowsis alpha!

hm:
(abbreviated)
“So, rumor has it that Google is working on a browser and/or other software to challenge Microsoft. … If true, the folks at Google should get in touch with me… without disclosing too much (yet), we are working on a project (for SRI and DARPA) to build a Java-based fully-semantic open-sourced PIM that grafts Mozilla onto my company’s Semantic Applications Platform. The result is an integrated cross-platform PIM suite comprised of an OWL-ontology-based Web browser, e-mail, calendar, to-do manager, and chat… and that’s just the beginning…”
http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/09/googles_browser.html

sounds to me like another haystack to find a needle in 🙂

but it is true, we need a Semantic Browser.

By the way, I can announce something, too….