Re: Open source faceted browser recommendations?

On Sat, 2012-04-21 at 13:26 +0200, Ivan Herman wrote:
> On Apr 19, 2012, at 23:31 , David Booth wrote:
[ . . . ]
> > That database would seem like a logical place to list faceted browsers,
> > but AFAICT it does not have a "faceted browser" category, or even a
> > "browser" category:
> > http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/Category:Tool
> 
> ... but this can be done, any category can be added. It is a wiki...
> although adding a new tool requires some semantic mediawiki wizzardy.
> But, please, do it, the wiki page should not depend on me only!

I since noticed that there is a "Special Browser" category, so that
seems the closest.

The biggest problem is that the vast majority of the tools listed appear
to be abandoned or obsolete.  This was impossible to determine from the
wiki entry, so I added two new predicates to make this easier to figure
out in the future: DateOfLatestRelease and
UrlToVerifyDateOfLatestRelease.  For example, if you now view the page
for the Disco tool
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/Disco
You will see "Date of latest release: 2007-01-01 (verify)".  The
"(verify)" link allows you to easily check whether a newer version has
since been released since that metadata was last updated.  By clicking
on the "edit" tab (after logging in), you can then update the entry by
modifying the following lines:

 | DateOfLatestRelease=2007-01-01
 | UrlToVerifyDateOfLatestRelease=http://ng4j.cvs.sourceforge.net/ng4j/rdf-browser/


I manually went through all of the 22 tools listed in the "Special
Browser" category
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/Category:Special_Browser
and entered this metadata based on information that I was able to find
on the web.

I think the next things that would really help would be:

1. Adding a view that would allow tools to be filtered or viewed by
DateOfLatestRelease, so that obsolete tools -- for example, those that
have not had a new release in over a year -- can be easily ignored.
This could be done either by sorting by DateOfLatestRelease or by
filtering.

2. Adding this metadata to more of the tools (as well as updating the
entries in general).  It is very easy to add this metadata, just by
clicking the "edit" tab when viewing a tool entry, and adding two lines
like those shown in the example above.

3. Tools that are tagged as being within a subcategory should show up as
being within the parent category -- i.e., by category subsumption.  At
present they don't, which means that it is hard to figure out what all
of the tools are for a given category.

As Ivan suggests, I encourage others to help.

Thanks!

-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of his employer.

Received on Saturday, 21 April 2012 15:34:29 UTC