TopBraid Composer is now also an RDFa editor

I hope some members of this group may be pleased to read that we have 
added RDFa editing support to our Semantic Web development tool TopBraid 
Composer. This support currently includes

- Syntax highlighting of the RDFa keywords

- Auto-completion of property and resource names (with CTRL-space)

- Mouse-driven navigation from an RDFa element to the corresponding 
resource in the ontology (CTRL-mouse over)

- A button to quickly extract and view the triples encoded inside the 
RDFa document

- Error checking at edit-time so that unknown resource names are marked 
as warnings

- A library of typical RDFa source pattern snippets

- Drag and drop from TopBraid's ontology windows into the RDFa text area

Needless to say that people editing RDFa this way can at any time use 
the TopBraid infrastructure to create ontologies, run reasoners, query 
engines or all kinds of visualizations and mashups to test how other 
RDFa-aware applications may work with the page.

Details and screenshots are shown in our blog [1].  Feedback welcome.


We faced one inconvenience (and we anticipate that others will have 
similar problems with RDFa tool support):  we base our editor on an 
HTML/JSP extension of Eclipse, and this is geared towards HTML 
conventions.  For example it would show a warning if a <META> tag is 
used outside of the <HEAD>.  However, in RDFa the interpretation and 
grammar of HTML is slightly relaxed to allow META to appear in the 
<BODY> as well.  Any HTML aware tool will by default mark this as a 
warning and such things are difficult or impossible to "overload" from a 
plugin lower down in the stack.  Maybe the group has some thoughts.

Regards,
Holger

[1] 
http://composing-the-semantic-web.blogspot.com/2007/01/topbraid-is-now-also-rdfa-editor.html

Received on Tuesday, 9 January 2007 01:04:40 UTC