Re: On RDF UIs (Sponate, Jassa, Facete)

On 12/4/13 11:27 AM, Claus Stadler wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I feel its time that we share some information of JavaScript related 
> projects we are working on:
>
>
>>> My vision is that power users will be able to create/adapt views
>
> This is also our vision, but we are using a different approach:
> Rather then describing views in RDF, we just embrace the AngularJS 
> framework and
> work on a SPARQL-to-JSON mapper called Sponate for this purpose.
> In a nutshell, Sponate is a combination of the words SParql, jsON and 
> hiberNATE, and allows you to aggregate
> SPARQL result sets into JSON documents.
>
> Based on these JSON documents, Sponate then offers a MongoDB interface 
> for querying (check 
> http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/operator/query/).
> And the best thing: AngularJS makes the creation of interactive views 
> based on JSON documents a real breeze!

Yes, but why do you now introduce a MongoDB dependency?

What happens when a SPARQL endpoint returns SELECT query results in JSON?

What happens when a SPARQL endpoint returns DESCRIBE and CONSTRUCT query 
results in JSON-LD or RDF/JSON?
>
>
> An very initial demo is available here (check the source code of the 
> page).
>
> http://cstadler.aksw.org/jassa/sponate/
>
>
> Right now we are working on translating MongoDB criteria queries into 
> corresponding SPARQL graph patterns.
> The demo only features client side filtering, which is pretty useless 
> for large result sets ;)
>

Why don't you stick with SPARQL and triples? Why the MonogoDB 
dependency, I ask again?

> Furthermore, we are combining this approach with the 'Facete' library, 
> which will eventually offer client side SPARQL based faceted search 
> over the Sponate views.
> (Hope to have a demo on this in 1 or 2 weeks)
>
> For managing the complexity, we are developing these efforts under the 
> name
> Jassa - which stands for JAvscript Suite for Sparql Access.
>
> https://github.com/GeoKnow/Jassa
>
> It re-uses many design patterns of the Apache Jena project - I didn't 
> feel there was a need to invent some JavaScriptish/JSONish API which 
> gets more messy to use as the complexity increases :)
>
> Maybe its also interesting to mention, that Jassa builds on prior 
> expertise we collected from the following projects:
> 'Sparqlify': SPARQL-to-SQL rewriter 
> (https://github.com/AKSW/Sparqlify) (Sponate is is some way similar to 
> SPARQL-to-SQL rewriting, yet different)
> 'Facete SPARQL Browser': (http://cstadler.aksw.org/facete/), 
> Application from which we are factoring out the faceted search 
> JavaScript library 'Facete'
> 'Jena SPARQL API' (https://github.com/AKSW/jena-sparql-api): Utility 
> library with a Sparql service abstraction as to not have the 
> application layer to worry about caching, delays, pagination, and 
> temorary failures.
> 'Mappify': (https://github.com/GeoKnow/Mappify) Customized creation of 
> interactive maps from spatial RDF data - based on Jassa - first public 
> relase planned in January.
>
> If anyone is interested in joining efforts, that would be awesome :)
> For example, I would love to adapt/integrate a Sparql parser into 
> Jassa, such as for query optimization.

A lot of work that I believe can be negated by just using SPARQL, 
Triples (represented in RDF/JSON, JSON-LD if you choose) alongside HTML5 
and CORs.

I am hoping that this group is ultimately about solutions that are 
loosely coupled i.e., no dependencies beyond Javascript, HTTP, CORs, and 
structured data.

Kingsley
>
> Best,
> Claus
>
>
> On 04.12.2013 16:42, Adrian Gschwend wrote:
>> On 04.12.13 12:37, Ruben Verborgh wrote:
>>
>> Hi Ruben, hi Michael,
>>
>>> That sounds cool. Would you have a demo somewhere? Also, I like the
>>> word "adaptive" in there and I wonder whether it could be a nice
>>> application of streaming. We could imagine the simple case of the
>>> visualization updating as a large Turtle file comes in, but also
>>> updating iteratively as more and more data is explored. For instance,
>>> if a user activates a node, data is pulled from the Web through
>>> dereferencing.
>> would be cool indeed. The idea is to use the power of RDF to create
>> adaptive views. When I started working with RDF a few years back I was
>> very frustrated with the visual interface layer, which was back then
>> basically non existing. Now we have at least some choice but what bugs
>> me is that with RDF I get a highly adaptive data model (at least
>> compared to everything else I know) but I still have to create views the
>> way I did it since I started playing with PHP & SQL 15 years ago. Like
>> more or less hard wired views on a (again mostly hard wired) queries.
>>
>> So in this project we try to come up with a layer which decouples this.
>> You can describe a view in RDF, using classes & attributes to describe
>> what this view should consist of. When we get RDF data (via
>> dereferencing or via query) we analyze what we get, try to find a
>> matching view (or might ask the user to choose one if we have more than
>> one) and hand it to a "renderer". In the rendering I can use different
>> templates for different devices or interfaces. Like this we can show
>> different representations of the same data and the same view on
>> different devices (or user preferences). We try to do this as generic as
>> possible but as specific as necessary.
>>
>> My vision is that power users will be able to create/adapt views and
>> share them (as RDF graphs) among other users. The UI elements can also
>> be more or less generic (container like principle) so they can get
>> shared and combined within certain boundaries.
>>
>> For those who did work with Frenel: It goes into a similar direction but
>> differs in details and implementation (for reasons I will describe when
>> we have some demos).
>>
>>
>> regards
>>
>> Adrian
>>
>>
>


-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Personal Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter Profile: https://twitter.com/kidehen
Google+ Profile: https://plus.google.com/+KingsleyIdehen/about
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen