Re: Making human-friendly linked data pages more human-friendly (was: dbpedia not very visible, nor fun)

It is nice to have pages that appeal to people, but projects that
start from assorted RDF, and do not have a typical single resource
layout might find it hard to get a meaningful sort arrangement in
general. I will be thinking about this in the future though as the
current layout of Bio2RDF HTML pages is based on being easy to debug
at an RDF level as opposed to easy to follow for a non-involved user.
One of the main troubles with Bio2RDF is that not every page is
designed to contain only one resource, as it is also an interface for
RESTful query results, and hence it at least requires three sorts of
information to match the RDF triples that make up the information
content. There is the idea of namespaces though for pages that are
only made up to represent single resources, so if there are namespace
specific rendering options they could be used in those cases without
much trouble at all given that it borrowed the interface style from
Pubby and it was run quite heavily using Velocity templates that are
easy to mix and match.

I definitely don't want Bio2RDF pages that can't be displayed without
Javascript turned on like OpenCalais though.

Cheers,

Peter

2009/9/15 Matthias Samwald <samwald@gmx.at>:
> A central idea of linked data is, in my understanding, that every resource
> has not only a HTTP - resolvable RDF description of itself, but also a
> human-friendly rendering that can be viewed in a web browser. With the
> increasing popularity of RDFa, the URIs of these resources are not only
> hidden away in triplestores, but become increasingly exposed on web pages.
> People want to click on them, and, hopefully, not all of these people come
> from the core community of RDF enthusiasts.
>
> This means that the HTML rendering of linked data resources might need to
> look a bit sexier than it does today. I dare to say that the Pubby-esque
> rendering of DBpedia pages such as
> http://dbpedia.org/page/Primary_motor_cortex
> is helpful to get a quick overview of the RDF triples about this resource,
> but non-RDF-enthusiasts would not find it very inviting.
>
> This could be improved by changes in the layout, and possibly a manually
> curated ordering of properties. For example,
> http://d.opencalais.com/er/company/ralg-tr1r/f8a13a13-8dbc-3d7e-82b6-1d7968476cae.html
> definitely looks more inviting than the typical DBpedia page (albeit still a
> bit sterile).
>
> In the case of DBpedia, it might be better to expose the excellent
> human-readable Wikipedia page for each resource, plus a prominently
> positioned 'show raw data' tab at the top. For other linked data resources
> that are not derived from existing human-friendly web pages, a few stylistic
> changes (ala OpenCalais) already might improve the situation a lot.
>
> Note that this comment is not intended to be a criticism of DBpedia, but of
> all Linked Data resources that expose HTML descriptions of resources.
> DBpedia is just the most popular example.
>
> Cheers,
> Matthias Samwald
>
> DERI Galway, Ireland
> http://deri.ie/
>
> Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution & Cognition Research, Austria
> http://kli.ac.at/
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> From: "Danny Ayers" <danny.ayers@gmail.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 4:03 AM
> To: <public-lod@w3.org>
> Subject: dbpedia not very visible, nor fun
>
>> It seems I have a Wikipedia page in my name (ok, I only did fact-check
>> edits, ok!?). So tonight I went looking for the corresponding triples,
>> looking for my ultimate URI...
>>
>> Google "dbpedia" => front page, with news
>>
>> on the list on the left is "Online Access"
>>
>> what do you get?
>>
>> [[
>> The DBpedia data set can be accessed online via a SPARQL query
>> endpoint and as Linked Data.
>>
>> Contents
>> 1. Querying DBpedia
>> 1.1. Public SPARQL Endpoint
>> 1.2. Public Faceted Web Service Interface
>> 1.3. Example queries displayed with the Berlin SNORQL query explorer
>> 1.4. Examples rendering DBpedia Data with Google Map
>> 1.5. Example displaying DBpedia Data with Exhibit
>> 1.6. Example displaying DBpedia Data with gFacet
>> 2. Linked Data
>> 2.1. Background
>> 2.2. The DBpedia Linked Data Interface
>> 2.3. Sample Resources
>> 2.4. Sample Views of 2 Sample DBpedia Resources
>> 3. Semantic Web Crawling Sitemap
>> ]]
>>
>> Yeah. Unless you're a triplehead none of these will mean a thing. Even
>> then it's not obvious.
>>
>> Could someone please stick something more rewarding near the top! I
>> don't know, maybe a Google-esque text entry form field for a regex on
>> the SPARQL. Anything but blurb.
>>
>> Even being relatively familiar with the tech, I still haven't a clue
>> how to take my little query (do I have a URI here?) forward.
>>
>> Presentation please.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Danny.
>>
>> --
>> http://danny.ayers.name
>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 15 September 2009 09:33:29 UTC