Re: GSoC 2013 Project for RDFa

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.
* Create a tinyurl/permalink service to make it easier to link to
  examples. See 'permalink' here: http://json-ld.org/playground/
* 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.

> 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

> 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.

> 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.

> 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 Monday, 15 April 2013 02:36:03 UTC