On RDF UIs (was Re: N3.js 0.2.0: now with browser support)

On 04.12.13 12:37, Ruben Verborgh wrote:

Hi Ruben, hi Michael,

> That sounds cool. Would you have a demo somewhere? Also, I like the
> word "adaptive" in there and I wonder whether it could be a nice
> application of streaming. We could imagine the simple case of the
> visualization updating as a large Turtle file comes in, but also
> updating iteratively as more and more data is explored. For instance,
> if a user activates a node, data is pulled from the Web through
> dereferencing.

would be cool indeed. The idea is to use the power of RDF to create
adaptive views. When I started working with RDF a few years back I was
very frustrated with the visual interface layer, which was back then
basically non existing. Now we have at least some choice but what bugs
me is that with RDF I get a highly adaptive data model (at least
compared to everything else I know) but I still have to create views the
way I did it since I started playing with PHP & SQL 15 years ago. Like
more or less hard wired views on a (again mostly hard wired) queries.

So in this project we try to come up with a layer which decouples this.
You can describe a view in RDF, using classes & attributes to describe
what this view should consist of. When we get RDF data (via
dereferencing or via query) we analyze what we get, try to find a
matching view (or might ask the user to choose one if we have more than
one) and hand it to a "renderer". In the rendering I can use different
templates for different devices or interfaces. Like this we can show
different representations of the same data and the same view on
different devices (or user preferences). We try to do this as generic as
possible but as specific as necessary.

My vision is that power users will be able to create/adapt views and
share them (as RDF graphs) among other users. The UI elements can also
be more or less generic (container like principle) so they can get
shared and combined within certain boundaries.

For those who did work with Frenel: It goes into a similar direction but
differs in details and implementation (for reasons I will describe when
we have some demos).


regards

Adrian


-- 
Adrian Gschwend
@ netlabs.org

ktk [a t] netlabs.org
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