Re: Making RDF / LinkedData trivially browseable - thoughts?

>
> > What do you guys think of this approach?
>
> I'm actually not quite sure exactly what you're trying to achieve. There
> are a bunch of generic data browsers, Tabulator, OpenLink Data Explorer
> (FF extensions), Disco Hyperdata Browser, etc. So, it seems to me those
> could be used for browsing data.
>

Tabulator - if you have to install it as a firefox extension, there's a lot
of overhead.
Openlink, Disco - would absolutely solve this problem if there was a "view
this data in disco" button in firefox, or on the actual document itself.

For something which has:
 - No installation
 - Nothing in between you and the "view source" functionality of your
browser
 - The benefit of being the raw machine friendly data you can just HTTP GET

Simple XSL seems to win a few battles.

Where it loses is the complexity and pain in the ass factor for authoring
the stuff.

I would hope for something similar to http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/ -
A simple, rough and ready stylesheet that everyone in the linked data
community could easily stick on their data, to make it a bit more friendly
to people who accidentally discover it.





>
> I've been writing huge amounts of XSLT for my apps (basically doing XSLT
> on a constrained RDF/XML tree), and it gets really, really ugly pretty
> quick.


Agreed, it *can* get ugly, but for solving an extremely limited set of
requirements ('make links', 'put a small logo as a background image', 'add a
link to the normal html view / about page'); I believe it could be
reasonably maintainable.



Unfortunately, the best way for me to make this point is not the way I've
gone about it - it needs less talk, more action!

With the next release of my work application, I'll make sure that there's a
half decent demonstration of the idea. Unfortunately, that's a few days off
at least.