Re: GSoC 2013 Project for RDFa

Hi Manu,

Thanks for you replay! Could you please help me with the further
questions below?

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 10:35 AM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
> On 04/14/2013 10:56 AM, Tao Lin wrote:
>> I'm Tao Lin, an undergraduate student from China. I'm very
>> interested in contributing to W3C for RDFa [1] in GSoC 2013.
>
> Hi Tao, a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for your interest in GSoC 2013.
>
>> 1. Introduction to myself I've successfully completed 2 GSoC projects
>> for the past 2 years. Especially in GSoC 2012, I added the RDFa
>> metadata support for Apache ODF Toolkit [2], in order to provide the
>> abilities to annotate parts of the ODF [3] document and the document
>> itself with arbitrary RDFa annotations. I have good knowledge of
>> Semantic Web related technologies, like RDF, RDFa, Linked Data and
>> schema.org. I'm also interested in website development in the
>> front-end, with the skills of Javascript, HTML5 and D3.js. Although I
>> don't know the new standard of JSON-LD, I think I can study and get
>> familiar with it within days.
>
> Very impressive!
>
>> 2. About the RDFa project I just went through the project ideas [1].
>> The following one attracts me a lot: - Expand the
>> http://rdfa.info/play/ tool to add support for JSON-LD, more/smoother
>> visualizations of data.
>
> That would be a pretty fun project to work on. There are a number of new
> features that we'd like to add, so it's great that you are interested in
> working on it.
>
>> However, the description of this project is "only a starting point".
>> It's greatly appreciated if you can tell me more details. What are
>> the requests, the new functions of the play tool.
>
> Here are a couple of requests:
>
> * Include a large number of schema.org examples in a way that doesn't
>   complicate the web interface. For example, see the Microdata markup
>   for the following: http://schema.org/Movie - We would like examples
>   for almost every schema.org class that there is.
You know that schema.org contains the examples in Microformat instead
of RDFa. We don't need to deal with Microformat, do we? I can
transform the examples from Microformat into RDFa by my hands, not by
coding using a "Microformat to RDFa" library. Is that your idea?
There's a type hierarchy for "Thing" [1] in schema.org, which contains
super types and their sub types. Shall I make the examples for just
the leaf ones, just the root ones, or both (i.e. there would be
hundreds types in all)? For example, CreativeWork > Article >
ScholarlyArticle > MedicalScholarlyArticle, shall I make 4 examples
(i.e. 1 for each)?
I find that some types contain the examples, but not all of them (e.g.
http://schema.org/DataCatalog). I need to create the examples for
Datalog myself. Is that true? Or shall I just use all of the examples
that schema.org provides without creating new ones?
All of questions are related to the workload of the GSoC project. It
would be quite different for the project plan with 50 examples or with
500 ones. I think it's better to estimate it beforehand. What do you
mean by "a large number of examples"? Is that useful for the RDFa play
tool to make a example for each one?

[1] http://schema.org/docs/full.html

> * Create a tinyurl/permalink service to make it easier to link to
>   examples. See 'permalink' here: http://json-ld.org/playground/
Is the service a server-side one (e.g. PHP) or just some client-side
javascript codes? If it's the former one, can you show me the
server-side codes of permalink service of json-ld playground (in
github?)? What programming language does it use, PHP, JSP or something
else?


> * Add a "template-mode" to the playground where developers can pick from
>   a template like a Person, Place, or Event, fill in fields for the
>   object and have the HTML auto-generated for them.
I can basically understand the idea. But can you show me some similar
websites/tools/examples, especially for the UI design?


>
>> For example, what kinds of more visualizations?
>
> We haven't thought through these fully, but we'd like to see if any of
> these visualizations would provide a better understanding of the graph.
> We would also like to know if being able to collapse/expand nodes would
> be helpful to developers.
>
> http://bl.ocks.org/4062045
> http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111116/force-collapsible.html
> http://bl.ocks.org/1377729
This is my favourite part of this project. I think that the graph-like
visualization is more intuitive than the current tree-like one. The
tree structure is better for displaying the data schema hierarchies,
e.g. OWL T-Box, schema.org type hierarchy. For instance-level graphs,
nodes and edges with Force-Directed layout or Spring layout, are
better solutions. I have experience with Java based graph
visualization tools for RDF/OWL graph rendering, such as Prefuse [1]
and Touchgraph [2]. For this GSoC 2013 project, I think D3.js is a
better choice, as you pointed out.
It's great to provide the functions of collapsing/expanding nodes for
the complex large graphs. However, if our RDFa examples are just small
demos with a few nodes, it would not be helpful indeed, I think.

[1] prefuse.org
[2] TouchGraph
>
>> What's smoother visualization?
>
> If you edit the HTML data, you will notice that the visualization below
> is completely re-drawn when in many cases only one node should appear or
> disappear. We'd like to make it so that when one node is added to the
> graph, that only the node appears instead of the entire graph needing to
> be re-drawn.
I've got it. I used to work on TouchGraph based application to
add/remove nodes to/from the graphs. I'm also interested in this part.
I'll look into D3.js to figure out how to make it.

>
>> How to support JSON-LD in details?
>
> We would have to figure out a way to transform the RDFa to JSON-LD.
> There is already a library for dealing with JSON-LD here:
>
> https://github.com/digitalbazaar/jsonld.js/
>
> We would have to read in RDFa from the HTML input box, then use the
> JSON-LD library to convert the RDFa to JSON-LD, and then display the
> JSON-LD in an more readable way for Web developers (without using
> CURIEs, for example). This would require you to:
>
> 1. Create a few new JSON-LD contexts for popular vocabularies like
>    schema.org.
> 2. Create a JSON-LD syntax highlighter for CodeMirror.
> 3. Create the glue code to go from RDFa (using the Green Turtle
>    library), to JSON-LD. There are examples of how to do this online.
Actually, I'm very familiar with JSON-LD. It took me a few days to
study the specification of JSON-LD. Not sure whether I can do it this
summer. It seems that there would be other W3C GSoC projects for
JSON-LD. If so, I'm happy to work together with the other students who
are more expertised in JSON-LD, to complete this task cooperatively.
If not, and it's an urgent task, I'll see what I can do. What do you
think?

>
>> The GSoC project will last for 3 month. I'd like to divide it into
>> some specific tasks, and then make a plan with a timeline
>> accordingly. Now I need your help for the task list. Thanks a lot!
>
> This is a question to the rest of the people cc'd on this e-mail. Can
> you think of other features that you'd like to see in the RDFa Play
> tool? Tao can pick from the ones that interest him the most.
>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: Google Summer of Code 2013: RDFa, JSON-LD, Web Payments
> http://digitalbazaar.com/2013/03/12/gsoc/

Received on Thursday, 18 April 2013 14:22:37 UTC