Author: leobard

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….

The Technical University of Vienna has a blogging service for its students.

http://twoday.tuwien.ac.at/

it was done by http://www.knallgrau.at the company that also hosts the weblog that you are reading here.

according to the press release:
http://www.tuwien.ac.at/pr/pa/pa_04_40.shtml

they plan to enable 15000 students und 2500 Scientific People to start blogging. The project should be accompanied by research initiatives. They are inspired by other universities that also allow blogging.

looks like a good idea to me to generate Semantic Web content.