Welkin: A General-Purpose RDF Browser 189
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine you are a reading a book, but each word is connected by string to a dictionary reference, and each dictionary reference definition is tied to the definitions of the words in the definition. You'd end up with a huge, eventually circular mess of string and you couldn't realistically get any enjoyment out of the book. The fact of the matter is that if you want to get more information about something, it is easy to go to an outside source to look it up. It does not need to be easier, because by making it easier than it must be you necessarily end up cluttering the thing you want to illuminate.
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.
Solution space? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The question is not about a browser-Paradigm (Score:5, Interesting)
Or a testament of the inability of the paradigm's creator to get people to understand it's necessity.
Gee thanks...-Bic Lighters and natives. (Score:1, Interesting)
Yea. Just try getting a programmer to explain the latest thing they're working on. "Well you see it does this, and if you click on that, something happens. It's all too complicated to explain, sorry."
Re:RDF a load of crap (Score:3, Interesting)
Much work on the semantic web has been with n3 [w3.org]
N3 is a superset of rdf, allowing for quoting of groups of triples (known a formulae). In n3, you can say things about groups of n3 triples, including about their trustworthiness.
For instance, you can say:essentially saying that the formula which is the semantics of the given document if of a class
There are many who are very wary on n3 for precisely the same reasons.
Note that I will always plug n3, given that I'm heavily involved with cwm [w3.org].
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:3, Interesting)
Right, but the problem is if it's unusable for humans to _create_ that content, or to map it from human knowledge-space into machine-parseable format, then it doesn't matter if it's well-engineered from the machine's perspective. That's why adoption of the semantic web has been so poor (outside of applications that could just as well be filled with any ole' XML dialect, like RSS or RDF descriptors used to package Firefox extensions, and so on).
Nobody wants to hire a team of ontological engineers to map information they already have in human accessible form into some highly structured, machine parseable format, and pay them to keep that information up-to-date. Mind you, companies only started paying people to put stuff up on the web when it became clear there was demand, and the early adopters of the web were individuals and academics, but the web was accessible from day one - I put up my first personal web page when I was 15 years old or so, and it took me about an hour to figure out how to do it.
Also remember that big companies spend tens of millions of dollars hacking together some HTML for their website. Imagine how much they would have to pay to get people smart enough to construct ontologies and RDF data versions of all of their content. Yowsers!
This business isn't vaporware.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I think eventSherpa is pretty neat.
(Disclaimer: I know the CEO.)
Visualization conundrum (Score:2, Interesting)
One trouble regarding many semantic visualization techniques involving large datasets is: the more visually appealing a graph is rendered, the less useful it often becomes. Many projects undertaken over the past 6 years (including Welkin) have focused on 2- and 3-dimensional renderings of a dataspace, using lines, proximity, node-shape, fly-over metadata display, etc. to classify and relate nodes, only to find there is no room left for persistent display of the textual metadata that ultimately drives a user toward the content he/she is looking for.
Marcos Weskamp's Newsmap [marumushi.com] (slashdot [slashdot.org]) on the other hand demonstrates an excellent balance of form and function, emphasizing textual metadata over symbolic graphic representation. How might this approach be applied specifically to RDF? One possibility: 5 axes rendered in a 2d visual space: color (category), saturation (relevance), size (interest), x/y position (age) and text (metadata). Just a thought anyway.
Re:Why is this funny? (Score:3, Interesting)
All this talk about GBrowser (Google's browser), for instance.... what do you think it is going to be based on? Firefox, of course! You don't think Google would be crazy not to make use of that powerful, flexible, extensible platform that runs on all major operating systems, has support of geeks and hackers to the point where they contribute $250K for The New York Times advert.
More like answer to a question no one asked (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The wrong answer to the right question (Score:3, Interesting)
It does seem to me that the key thing is to promote ad-hoc use of a relatively standardized mechanism for relating XML document structures to other XML document structures. Forget about waiting for somebody else to build relevant ontologies, reconstructing the entirety of human knowledge from the ground up, or any of that stuff. What people could reasonably do today is relate XML schema one to XML schema two because they need to connect widget A with widget B. Make the adoption of this technology as low cost as possible.
Just like adding a few anchor tags to a basic HTML document is an easy way to relate some human readable information to other human readable information, relating XML document types to other XML document types should be "easy".
Then the only big problem is to find a few applications that would actually demonstrate the benefits of doing this clearly. Yes, it is effectively a distributed XML database of sorts, but what is it good for? RSS has real applications for end users, so it has caught on. Without some software to demonstrate the benefits of linking up your XML data structures, people just won't bother with it. It seems specific, realistic use cases are what's needed here (and what seems terribly lacking from all the W3C RDF documentation as well). How does the distributed, semi-structured database that results provide use to me beyond what I have now with lots of disparate XML documents out there, when you cut out the truly grandiose notions behind RDF and the full-fledged semantic web?
I'm too tired to come up with convincing arguments right now, so hopefully somebody else will fill in the blanks here.
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:1, Interesting)
Half a century later, we have the Internet. This technology is available to us, and people... shun it! Links to ancillary information are perfectly valid, and important, even if people do not elect to access the resources given.
Hypertext can be seen merely as a superior form of footnoting - you can choose not to read the footnotes (or endnotes), but it may hinder your understanding and comprehension of a text.
For enjoyment? Simply ignore the hyperlinks. Good usability practices in design would mean that hyperlinks are noticable, without being intrusive. I'll stop now before I start on a design rant, though
Josh
http://www.joahua.com/ [joahua.com]