Re: "Microsoft Access" for RDF?

Well here is my user story.

I am looking at a page that looks like this

http://dbpedia.org/page/Albert_Einstein

it drives me up the wall that the following facts are in there:

:Albert_Einstein
   dbpedia-owl:childOf :EinsteinFamily ;
   dbpedia-owl:parentOf :EinsteinFamily .

which is just awful in a whole lot of ways.  Case (1) is that I click an X
next to those two triples and they are gone,  Case (2) is that I can create
new records to fill in his Family tree and that will involve many other
user stories such as (3) user creates literal field and so forth.

Freebase and Wikidata have "good enough" user interfaces that revolve
around entities,  see

https://www.freebase.com/m/0jcx  (while you still can)
http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q937

but neither of those is RDF-centric.  It seems to me that an alternative
semantics could be defined for RDF and OWL that work work like so:

* we say :Albert_Einstein is a :Person
* we then see some form with fields people can fill,  or alternately there
is a dropdown list with predicates that have this as a known domain;  the
range can also be used backwards so that we expect a langstring or integer
or link to another :Person

It's important that this be some tool that somebody who knows little about
RDF can enter data and edit it with a little bit of task-oriented (as
opposed to concept-oriented training.)

The idea here is that the structures and vocabulary are constrained so that
the structures are not complex;  both DBpedia and Freebase are so
constrained.  You might want to say things like

    [ a       sp:Ask ;
                rdfs:comment "must be at least 18 years old"^^xsd:string ;
                sp:where ([ sp:object sp:_age ;
                            sp:predicate my:age ;
                            sp:subject spin:_this
                          ] [ a       sp:Filter ;
                            sp:expression
                                    [ sp:arg1 sp:_age ;
                                      sp:arg2 18 ;
                                      a sp:lt
                                    ]
                          ])
    ]


and that is cool,  but I have no idea how to make that simple for a muggle
to use and I'm interested in these things that are similar in character to
a relational database,  so I'd say that is out-of-scope for now.  I think
this tool could probably edit RDFS schemas (treating them as instance data)
but not be able to edit OWL schemas (if you need that use an OWL editor)

Now if I was really trying to construct family trees I'd have to address
cycles like that with some algorithms and heuristics because it probably
take a long time to pluck them out by hand,  but some things you'll want to
edit by hand and that process will be easier if you are working with a
smaller data set,  which you can easily find.

If you have decent type data,  as does Freebase,  it is not hard to pick
out pieces of the WikiWorld,  such as "ski areas" or "navy ships" and the
project of improving that kind of database with hand tools is much more
tractable.

For small projects you don't need access controls,  provenance and that
kind of thing,  but if you were trying to run something like Freebase and
Wikidata where you know what the algebra is the obvious thing to do is use
RDF* and SPARQL*.