Welkin: A General-Purpose RDF Browser

Stefano Mazzocchi writes "Many consider the Semantic Web to be vaporware and others believe it's the next big thing. No matter where you stand, a question always pops up: Where is the RDF browser? The SIMILE Project, a joint project between W3C, MIT and HP to implement semantic interoperability of metadata in digital libraries, released today the first beta release of a general purpose graphic and interactive RDF browser named Welkin (see a screenshot), targetted to those who need to get a mental model of any RDF dataset, from a single RSS 1.0 news feed to a collection of digital data."

The question is not about a browser-Paradigm

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is an old saw, "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler." The Semantic Web, while an interesting idea, tries to make things too easy, beyond the point of usefulness. The lack of content on the Semantic Web is a testament to the uselessness of such an over-engineered web space."

Or a testament to people's inability to understand new paradigms.

This is the future of the web

[Nooface]

Browsing metadata is the next frontier in the evolution of the web. Some of the other RDF browsers popping up include Gnowsis [gnowsis.org], MIT Haystack [mit.edu], and Fenfire [nongnu.org].

With the growth of the Internet, the value of data itself is dropping, while the value of metadata (i.e. "data about data") increases, introducing a need for tools that can manipulate metadata. That is what RDF is all about - standardizing a way to represent metadata. It is not a standard for the metadata itself...those standards will be determined the same way everything else is on the Internet: with the best solutions rising to the top.

The most common objections to this scenario?
a) "Nobody will bother entering metadata". Wrong...it's already happening. Users are voluntarily generating metadata all the time. Just check out sites like flickr [flickr.com] (photo blogging) and del.icio.us [del.icio.us] (collaborative bookmarks), not to mention Amazon reviews and Ebay ratings.
b) "RDF tags will just be abused with spam, trolls, and other useless info". A variety of techniques are emerging that are designed to protect the integrity of user-contributed data, including trust metrics [moloko.itc.it] like Slashdot's own distributed moderation [umich.edu] (PDF) or Advogato [advogato.org].

Re:Gee thanks...

[Fnkmaster]

Your comments have no relevance to mine - I have done a fair amount of work with semantic web technologies before (well, compared to most people out there anyway), my comments were a response to my personal experiences, not some random misconceptions formed by reading Slashdot articles.

1) I never said anything of the sort. RDF/Semantic Web technologies have nothing to do with inserting links into HTML.

2) I never said it was a replacement for HTML. I just said it wasn't likely to be adopted because of the difficultly of creating content in a properly structured, ontologically connected RDF format.

Of course your secretary isn't supposed to hand-edit RDF files, but somebody has to not only write code that dumps stuff from a database into RDF (easy - not really any different from dumping into any ole' XML format) but map all the stuff into relevant ontologies (not easy), where "easy" is defined in terms of being comprehensible enough to permit adoption outside of academia.

3) It's only easier for two corporations to merge databases if all the entities therein are connected by direct or indirect ontological relationships. People have to build these relationships. That was the whole point of my post.

4) I said nothing about URIs being associated with viewable web pages. Stop inserting random straw man attacks.

Apparently you are the one who needs to RTFM instead of getting up on your high horse there, buddy. Not everybody on Slashdot is as ignorant as you presume.

Re:Semantic Web Firefox plugin?

[Paua Fritter]

There is a Mozilla extension called Annozilla [mozdev.org] which adds the ability to browse and edit RDF annotations to web pages, using the Annotea [w3.org] protocol.

Re:This is the future of the web

[Anonymous Coward]

There's absolutely no incentive for people to create, maintain, and verify useful metadata.

This article in Wired [wired.com] describes the incentives in some detail.

BZZZT, RDF is past sell-by date already

[Ars-Fartsica]

RDF has been collecting mold next to XSL and XML Schema for some time now. Its practically impossible to say anything interesting easily using RDF. Try composing even a moderately interesting RDF document yourself and you will see why no one is using it.

RDF in Mozilla

[Quantum Jim]

I would say that XUL [xulplanet.com] is more like HTML [w3.org] than RDF [w3.org]. However, you're right that Mozilla's framework has built-in support for querying RDF datastores [xulplanet.com] (although primitive compared with Jena or Redland). In fact Mozilla internally represents bookmarks through RDF [xulplanet.com] even though they are serialized in a pseudo-html syntax on disk (for compatibility reasons). The history, extension registry, and file system are also RDF-based. Mozilla may very well be the most widely distributed framework for accessing RDF datastores on the planet!