Re: Just a small note on an RDFa usage

Hello!

That is quite cool! I've had something like it in the back of my mind
for a while, inspired by an RDF "record editor" prototype we built for
a law annotation project last year (it's ongoing, but the editing was
only "proof of concept").

The editor webapp generated an html form with dhtml widgets based on
(somewhat idiomatic) RDFS/OWL/FRESNEL information. It also had a
(fairly limited) full text editor counterpart (based on WYMEditor),
which embedded RDFa.

I haven't taken the time to complete a generic, pure client version of
this editor yet, but I have started upon it (on my spare time). This
Talis work inspires me to go forward with this idea. Using the RDFa
attributes directly in the form widgets felt promising, albeit I need
to tinker with the details (like propagating @value values to @content
for the fields etc).

The existing prototype was a mix of server-side python dealing with
RDF, and client javascript managing "eRDF:ish" property names. It
posted back quite strange form fields which the server code had to
recode into RDF. Using RDFa in the client form just seems so much more
pure (especially since the client was so dhtml-heavy that building a
js-free version doesn't seem reasonable).

(Note that I don't currently intend to go further with the WYMEditor
part. It seemed to be a *lot* of detail "devils" to get through to
make "wysiwy[g|m]" editing with controlled RDFa easy. Maybe someday
(currently I just wish for RDFa in OpenOffice instead).)

As for "pure client", it'll probably require Gears for cross-site
schema access and caching. I currently use the javascript of Tabulator
and Ben's RDFa code.

*If* I complete something demo-worthy, I sure will post to this list. :)

Best regards,
Niklas



On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 5:22 PM, Ben Adida <ben@adida.net> wrote:
>
>
> Wow, I was hoping we'd see this kind of JS+RDFa usage at some point, but
> I wasn't expecting it so soon. That is fantastic!
>
> -Ben
>
> Ivan Herman wrote:
>> Just for info: Talis and the University of Plymouth just published a
>> nice SW Case Study[1]. There is a small detail (compared to the rest of
>> the system) that caught my attention on a usage of RDFa that I find
>> interesting:
>>
>> [[[
>> The interface to build or edit lists uses a WYSIWYG metaphor implemented
>> in Javascript operating over RDFa markup, allowing the user to drag and
>> drop resources and edit data quickly, without the need to round trip
>> back to the server on completion of each operation. The user's actions
>> of moving, adding, grouping or editing resources directly manipulate the
>> RDFa model within the page. When the user has finished editing, they hit
>> a save button which serialises the RDFa model in the page into an
>> RDF/XML model which is submitted back to the server. The server then
>> performs a delta on the incoming model with that in the persistent
>> store. Any changes identified are applied to the store, and the next
>> view of the list will reflect the user's updates.
>> ]]]
>>
>> (I put up a small blog on that[2])
>>
>> :-)
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Ivan
>>
>> [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/Talis/
>> [2] http://ivan-herman.name/2009/01/14/a-different-usage-of-rdfa/
>
>
>

Received on Friday, 16 January 2009 17:16:08 UTC